- “The Botanist Hacker” by Megan Scudellari link
- Drier weather 30 million years ago may have led to grass evolution link
- USAToday ScienceFair “Climate change may be especially tough on trees” by Monica Heger link
- New York Times “Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life” by Carl Zimmer link
Less than two years later, the mammal supertree is looking puny. In a paper to be published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, Stephen Smith of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina and his colleagues have created a tree containing 13,533 species of plants. Their study shows that ferns — sometimes considered as living fossils that have changed little for hundreds of millions of years — have actually been evolving faster than younger groups of plants, like conifers and flowering plants.
- featured article on BMC Evolutionary Biology website from Feb. 13 2009-link
- press release for Smith, S. A. and M. J. Donoghue. 2008. Rates of Molecular Evolution are Linked to Life History in Flowering Plants. Science. link
A clear pattern emerged. Plants with a shorter generation time — from the time they germinate to the time that a seed they produce germinates — generally show more rapid rates of molecular evolution. Longer-lived trees and shrubs, by contrast, evolve more slowly and show less variability in their rates of evolution. The study also showed that the difference in rate seen between herbs and woody plants has been maintained through evolutionary time.
