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
And then we ended up with flowering plants taking off.
And they've just continued to do that until today.
The flowering plant, that is.
They just thrived.
And then what happened was at the same time, this climate variation led to various insect groups also having a leg up over others.
More plants with these newfangled flowers and more insects.
And they started co-evolving or more likely pushing evolution because flowers and flowering plants created food and resources for these insects and small animals to adapt to.
There's some evidence that suggests that the main angiosperm lineages had already had whole genome duplication occur before this massive event.
What that gives you is more redundancy.
And what that probably did was create...
greater genomic resilience for these stressful environments.
More options were available to be able to adapt to local conditions.
Sex for most angiosperms, the pollen is protected from this really dry air we live in now.
Dry DNA equals no bueno.
The pollen is protected from the dry environment by being coated in two layers.
And the inside layer is the layer that normally would coat a sperm.
And then there's a layer outside that is hard and sometimes very sculpted.
And...
That protects the pollen grain until it gets to the female reproductive structure.
So then if you think about the female part, the ovule, which contains the ovary, that's also protected.
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