Flowers & #UCDavis in NYtimes article

Nice little article by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times today: Where Did All the Flowers Come From? – NYTimes.com

The article discusses flower evolution and has some good points. One in particular comes from Jim Doyle from UC Davis, who points out that one needs the fossil record to understand the evolutionary emergence of fossils flowers. It is a good thing to remember for all the gene jockeys (like me) out there who sometimes seem to think everything can be figured out from DNA.

Stay tuned for more about this in my blog – I am teaching a 750 person class “Bis 002C – Biodiversity and the tree of life” with Doyle and Peter Wainwright this fall and will be posting some notes based on the class. Maybe Doyle will make some other key points there …

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen