Tag: angiosperms

  • The Garden: Why are flowers a biological mystery?

    The Garden: Why are flowers a biological mystery?

    Last week I gave an online talk for The Garden, a new a platform that connects people who love to learn with academics and experts for live talks. I spoke on Darwin’s abominable mystery, covering 150 years of research on the origin of the flowering plants. This drew on articles I have published in American […]

  • A new talk on Darwin’s abominable mystery

    A new talk on Darwin’s abominable mystery

    Last evening I spoke for the Reading Geological Society on Darwin’s “abominable mystery”: the origin of flowering plants. My previous talks and publications (here and here) on this topic have focused mainly on the nineteenth century. In this new talk, I outlined twentieth century efforts to solve the mystery, which is something I continue to […]

  • Darwin’s abominable mystery

    One of the hidden gems of Royal Botanic Gardens Kew is its library. I spent several happy hours there researching a recent letter to Nature Ecology and Evolution, published in June under the title “The deepening of Darwin’s abominable mystery“. The brightest moment came when a helpful librarian found me an 1838 reprint of a […]