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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They're widespread, 2,500 species, but they are mechanically kind of bound to the tropics.
They can't cope with freezing on the whole.
There are a few exceptions.
Don't write in.
LAUGHTER
On the whole, palms can't cope with freezing because freezing causes catastrophic embolism of their plumbing.
Basically, you get a bubble and it can't function anymore.
So this makes them what we call niche conserved.
They are bound to a certain environment.
And as you can tell already, I love building the tree of life.
And my early days were spent frenetically building the palm tree of life.
And we have used that tree to try to see what that might tell us about the rainforest by combining it with fossils to turn this branching diagram actually into a proper chronology, if you like, so that the individual splits in this tree...
fit to a time.
We've related onto that tree the environments in which the modern species occur and reconstructed what the original, the ancestral condition might be.
And that tree told us, that analysis published in 2011, told us that palms appear to have evolved in the rainforest 100 million years ago, somewhere in the northern hemisphere.
This caused a bit of a drama because, in fact, from a paleo perspective, the fossil evidence for rainforest doesn't exist at that time.
The earliest fossil assemblages that look like they characterize a rainforest don't come until after the meteor impact and the extinction of dinosaurs around 60, 65 million years ago.
Well, of course, what is science for if not for revisiting later?
So the update to all of this is that we have managed to build an even bigger tree of life for palms with 80% of the 2,500 species in it now that gives us a more nuanced insight that shows us that palms are even older, perhaps 120 million years,
but that it appears now that they evolved in a non-rainforest environment but quickly moved into them around 60 million years.
Showing 61–80 of 149 · page 4 of 8
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