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

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

And it can also happen on what we call sky islands.

So if you like seeing mountains as island in a terrestrial landscape.

So, for example, in the Andes in the last two million years, the lupins have turned into shrubs and trees producing 80 different species.

It's completely mind boggling.

I guess it might be easier to try to address that in the flowering plants because in a sense a lot of the evidence is still there and the experience of seeing flowers

Birds pollinating and insects doing their thing is around us all the time and leads us to suspect that, for example, it's not a tree, but the fact that there are 25,000, 30,000 species of orchid is probably to do with their pollination interactions.

And it's worth saying, I mentioned earlier that when we look at how the flowering plants have diversified over time, we see this big rush at the beginning.

But there's actually also a sort of follow-up rush that is observable in the sort of 40 million year kind of area.

And we struggle to work out what that might be.

But one of the reasons for that could be positive feedbacks from the growth of important, the evolution of important animal lineages that then lead plants to diversify.

I haven't given you a tree-specific answer because that's a bit harder to tackle.

I'm out of my depth here.

I just wanted to make another plug for the palm family, if I may.

Please do.

The hundred and something metre sequoia is totally awesome.

But the palms still beat that in terms of total stem length, not in a tree form.

But there is a whole group of palms that have evolved from trees to become climbers, the so-called rattan's of the cane furniture industry.

And the longest stem that doesn't sort of root along its length was reported to be something like this.

200 metres long.

I think there was said to be a longer one, but an elephant chewed it up before it could be measured.

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