Category: BryologyPage 4 of 5
Studies in evolution, ecology and conservation of mosses, liverworts and hornworts at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days in Vienna, my first visit in 11 years, when I was last over for the 2005 XVII International…
Nordic ‘alimentation noire’: a culinary experiment, RBGE Canteen, 29 June 2016 (a continuation of Franklin Arctic Canadian Collections at RBGE – Part 1). What did the ‘tripe de…
The story and fate of the fourth of Sir John Franklin’s expeditions in search of the North-West Passage, on the ships Erebus and Terror in 1845–8, is well…
The genus Aitchisoniella contains a single species, A. himalayensis, which was described by Pakistani botanist Professor Shiv Ram Kashyap from plants that he collected in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, India…
Plant diversity does not have to be far-flung and exotic to be worth studying; even within Scotland, there are unanswered questions about plant distributions. Growing in our towns and…
Sitting in Edinburgh airport on a Monday morning, waiting for David Long to join me, checked in through to Trondheim via Copenhagen, I felt completely unprepared. The previous week…
One of the most recognisable groups in the bryophytes, the complex thalloid liverwort genus Marchantia, has just become a bit larger. We have sunk Preissia and Bucegia into…
This last week I’ve actually managed to spend a bit of time in the lab, trying to get some gaps filled in a DNA barcoding matrix for simple…
The complex thalloid liverwort Monocarpus sphaerocarpus has been found on two continents, Australia and Africa, separated by around 8,000 km of mostly ocean. The green plants themselves are…
The relative structural simplicity of some groups of mosses can disguise their uniqueness, especially when simplified features have evolved multiple times within the same family from ancestors with…
Although the exact relationships between the earliest land plant lineages are not yet well resolved, there is consensus that liverworts are one of the most ancient land plant…
One of the earliest plastid genomes to be sequenced, in the late 1980s (Ohyama et al.), was that of Marchantia polymorpha, one of the commonest liverworts around town,…
Rather a while ago, back in 2003, we started working on a phylogeny of the complex thalloid liverworts at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (as a Molecular Phylogenetics…
Back in 2014, staff in the molecular lab and herbarium at RBGE greatly enjoyed a three-week visit from Austrian Dr Wolfgang Hofbauer. With funding from the EU SYNTHESYS…
Sadly, although not surprisingly, I was not able to amplify the regions of Monocarpus DNA needed to compare it to other complex thalloid liverworts from a 1950s collection that we had…
At the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh we’ve been working on the phylogeny of the complex thalloid liverworts for rather a while now. David Long presented a poster on…
As far as liverworts go, Monocarpus is a rather strange plant. It’s very small, in itself not that unusual for a bryophyte, but rather problematic if you need…
Twenty-five participants from 13 countries have just attended a symposium on complex thalloid liverworts in Edinburgh #Marchantia2015. The meeting also included two teleconferences (from Australia, John Bowman, Monash…
What sorts of features provide the best clues about whether or not two plants are closely related? Sometimes it’s obvious – most people can correctly recognise a daffodil…
The complex thalloid liverworts, or Marchantiopsida, are one of the oldest land plant lineages, and contain a bewildering array of morphologies, ranging from comparatively simple plants like Blasia,…