Professor Michelle Waycott
speaker
53 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 7 Aug
Professor Michelle Waycott’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 Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Essentially, things used to be free floating and now they've come together in increasing complex and amazing structures that have given all this diversity we see in the land plants today.
Evolution is also for plants being about learning how to deal with being dry because early sex was all done in the water.
And in fact, it's still done in the water.
We just control the way that water is operating.
Some of the best fossils of true Angiospem flowers are from around 130 to 135 million years ago.
That's the very end of the Jurassic around that period.
And some of those structures are fairly simple representations of what we now know are the petals, the male parts, the anthers, and the female parts, the ovaries.
One of the amazing things about most flowering plants is that they're able to be produced from a shoot that used to be a bud that was going to produce a leaf and at some point the plant just decides, now I'm going to be a flower.
And the hormones and the stimulus for that lead to the switching on and off of various genes and then the change of the bud that was going to form leaves to be reproductive structures.
A whole bunch of things, but in particular the KT boundary associated with the meteor hitting Earth.
And when you change climate really rapidly on a big scale, is that all the ecosystems get out of whack.
Things don't work the way they normally do.
The increasing aridity of the environment, the change in carbon dioxide concentrations.
light limitation and energy cycles changing.
So imagine all of a sudden, you know, things being more stress.
And so this phrase, survival of the fittest, comes into play in extreme.
That's when we think a lot of the dinosaurs and the big, large animals were stressed so much they didn't survive.
The angiosperms... That's the flowering plants...
just became better at surviving year to year in these extreme conditions.
The older lineages, the conifers and things, they struggled and so the angiosperms got a leg up.
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