Christopher Berry

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

Christopher Berry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

So the oldest trees I've seen are about 393 million years old from the beginning of the Middle Devonian period.

And I suspect that a few million years before that, there's other types of simple tree leading up to these first trees that we know about.

And the first tree we have is a cladoxylopsid tree, and it's called calamophyton.

And it's an extinct type of organism.

So cladoxylopsid simply means that the wood is branched.

So inside the tree, there's lots of sort of network of wood rather than a solid cylinder of wood that you might expect in an oak tree or something today.

Got it.

And the name of the tree is calamophyton.

So that's a strange word, which is, I think, a combination of a Greek word for reed and phyton, which means plant.

It was considered very simple when they first found small parts of it.

So these are the first trees that we know of.

Yes, they are.

Now that we've been able to assemble the different bits that we've known about into one organism, which is a tree.

So it's a tree called Calamphiton.

It's probably about two metres tall, consists of a trunk.

It has simple but many roots at the bottom.

And from the sides, and particularly the top of the growing apex of the tree, would be lots of branches.

Those branches look a bit like, I'd say, maybe monkey arms with very long fingers.

And attached to those fingers would be tiny little twiggy things, which weren't leaves, but were probably photosynthesising.

And this thing would have just grown upwards to probably about maybe two and a half metres.

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