The Evolution of Plants

• 1: The evolutionary record and methods of reconstruction


• 2: Earliest forms of plant life


• 3: The colonization of land


• 4: The first forests


• 5: Major emergence of the seed plants


• 6: Flowering plant origins


• 7: The past 65 million years


• 8: Mass extinctions and persistent populations


• 9: Ancient DNA and the biomolecular record


• 10: Evolutionary theories and the plant fossil record

Kathy Willis is Director of the Biodiversity Institute in the Zoology Department at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at Merton College. She gained her first degree in Geography and Environmental Science from the University of Southampton, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in Plant Sciences. In her early postdoctoral career, Kathy held a Selwyn College Research Fellowship and then a NERC Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge. This was followed by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in the Godwin Institute for Quaternary Research, University of Cambridge. Kathy moved to a University Lectureship in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford in 1999 where she established the Oxford Long-term Ecology Laboratory in 2002 and was made a Professor of Long-term Ecology in 2008.

Jennifer C McElwain received her B.A. in Botany from Trinity College Dublin in 1993 and her PhD in Paleobotany in 1997 from Royal Holloway College, University of London. She was a Natural Environment Research Council Post Doctoral research associate between 1997 and 1998 and a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow between 1998 and 2000. McElwain held the position of Assistant Curator of Paleobotany at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago between 2000 and 2003 and was Associate Curator of Paleobotany from 2003 until 2006, when she took up her current position as Lecturer in Plant Palaeobiology and Palaeoecology in the School of Biology and Environmental Science at University College Dublin. She is a Research Associate of the Field Museum and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Northwestern University, USA.