Listen to Episode 125 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or anywhere you can find it!
This one family of plants can be found in nearly every environment on Earth, and yet their deep history is nearly entirely unknown to us. This episode, we discuss the diversity, evolution, and strangeness of Orchids.
Listen to Episode 115 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or pick your favorite place for podcasts!
The Earth is covered in ecosystems, but what lives where is dependent on the local climate and landscape. This variation creates vast patterns in the distribution of life, patterns that scientists can use to understand ecology, and patterns that have changed over time as the Earth’s surface has transformed. This episode, we discuss the modern state and ancient history of Biomes.
Listen to Episode 105 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever podcasts are provided!
Most plants are content to sit still and take in sunlight and soil nutrients, but when conditions are tough, some plants get hungry! The habit of devouring animal prey has evolved in plants numerous times. In this episode, we discuss the varied strategies and evolutionary history of Carnivorous Plants.
Listen to Episode 95 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or just search for it in your podcast app!
Most famous extinction events are very animal-focused, but the end of the Carboniferous saw one of the worst plant mass extinctions in Earth history. In this episode, we discuss the specifics, the background, the causes, and the impacts of the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse.
Listen to Episode 73 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts!
As our friend Aly is fond of saying, plants aren’t just a colorful background to Earth history, they’re dynamic and influential drivers of environmental change. In this episode, she joins us to discuss one of the most famous and important innovations in all of plant evolution: Trees.
Listen to Episode 62 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other podcast player you like!
For hundreds of millions of years, trees have produced resin. In the right conditions, that resin can harden and persist in the fossil record, and when we’re lucky, it can take with it all sorts of amazing organic remains that normally escape the fossil record: rare species, evidence of ecological interaction, and even behaviors caught in progress. This episode, we talk about the amazing world of Amber.
Listen to Episode 57 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast place!
In the modern world, flowering plants are dominant in nearly all ecosystems, but it wasn’t always this way. The fossil record of these plants doesn’t offer many clues to their origins, but once they arrived on the scene they underwent one of the biggest radiations in life history. In this episode, we’re joined again by our friend Aly Baumgartner to discuss the Evolution of Angiosperms.
Listen to Episode 38 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast source!
In this episode, we are joined by our friend Aly Baumgartner, who tells us all about one of the world’s most successful – and influential – groups of plants, including how they’ve evolved, spread, and changed the world. Our very first plant-dedicated topic: Grass!
The Common Descent Podcast 