Bill Baker

speaker

149 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2 Jul

Bill Baker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

In Our Time · The Evolution of Trees · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

So there are many tens of thousands of the 350,000 species of flowering plants are trees.

And

What our angiosperm tree of life shows us is that... Angiosperm?

Sorry, flowering plant.

Angiosperm is a synonym for flowering plants, plants that produce flowers and produce true fruit.

And so our flowering plant tree of life shows us very clearly that trees are not a group, that they have originated repeatedly...

Across this enormous group, we see a wonderful pattern in the way the flowering plants diversified.

Very early on in their origin, about 150 million years ago, there was this enormous surge in diversification.

All the major lineages, what we call the orders of flowering plants appearing, but we don't think that they were trees at that time.

The first groups that popped off were flimsy shrubs and climbers or the water lilies, for example.

They can't even make wood and they're aquatics.

There's a lack of clarity about exactly what the sequence was of diversification.

But we know that trees were probably not there in the earlier stages.

But by the end of the Cretaceous, they were very, very much present.

Rainforests obviously are iconic places for trees.

They're also really important for biodiversity.

We think maybe half of all plant species occur in rainforests, which take up just 7% of the world's land surface area.

So they're really important places.

And that idea begs the question, well, how on earth did that come about?

So the palms provide a fruitful line of inquiry on this subject because palms are found all over the tropics.

Showing 41–60 of 149 · page 3 of 8