Tag: LiverwortPage 1 of 2

Narrowing down Aneura pinguis

The thalloid liverwort Aneura pinguis (L.) Dumort. (basionym Jungermannia pinguis L.) has been reported from a bewildering range of climates and habitats, from neotropical cloud forests to Scottish…

Lindenberg’s Featherwort – liverwort child of the Atlantic

Geography, and particularly climate, have distinguished the extreme western parts of Scotland from the rest of the country for thousands of years. Many of our rarest plant species…

How much liverwort do you need to get 50 μg of DNA?

There’s an exciting project, The 10KP (10,000 Plants) Genome Sequencing Project, that aims to sequence and characterize representative genomes from every major clade of embryophytes, green algae, and…

What’s the matter with Nardia?

The leafy liverwort genus Nardia has five species that are known to occur in Scotland. Of these five species that occur in Scotland, four are described in Smith’s…

The liverwort genus Haplomitrium

Life gets littered with untold stories; here’s one that did get told, briefly, and then got forgotten. It was told at the Botany meeting in Austin in August…

Complex thalloid Asterella lateralis from Panama’s Volcano

During a family holiday to Santiago, Panama in June/July 2011, we snuck in a short bryologising trip, first heading west along the Pan-American Highway, then north, to the…

Snowbird, Utah – Marchantia (Preissia) quadrata from the Rockies

The Botany 2004 meeting was in Snowbird, Utah – a chance to see a different part of the United States (and, of course, to present our research to…

Gyrothyra underwoodiana from Vancouver Island

In April 2004, I flew north from Illinois to met up with a botanical friend, Dr Zoe Badcock. Our meeting point was Vancouver, British Columbia; from there we…

The plants of our lives

There’s something quite melancholy about going back through all the little paper packets of voucher specimens, remembering who and where you were when you collected them, and thinking…

Barcoding Britain’s Liverworts – progress to date

After RBGE’s initial involvement in land plant DNA barcode marker selection, culminating in a couple of 2009 papers that both utilized bryophyte barcoding data sets, we started a…

What’s the story when there’s no variation?

Enigmatic and isolated although it is, it seems that our Australian colleagues have now “got their eye in” for complex thalloid liverwort Monocarpus sphaerocarpus – after many years…

DNA identification of Long’s Long’s Marchantia

Many new species are already included in natural history collections around the world, it’s just that nobody has yet got around to examining the material, recognising that it represents something…

Long’s Marchantia

Formerly the head of our Cryptogam section, and currently an extremely active RBGE Research Associate, David Long is well known and respected for his botanical work in the…

Telaranea murphyae: The non-native endemic that wasn’t

Murphy’s threadwort (Telaranea murphyae) has had a singular position in the British flora. The species was described by renowned bryologist Jean Paton in 1965, from plants collected in…

Sphaerocarpos, preview to a monograph

The Sphaerocarpales (or “Bottle Liverworts”) form a very distinct group in the complex thalloid liverworts, with ca. 30 species in five genera: originally the group just included Geothallus…

A rapid phylogeny of Marchantia, from the RBGE collections. II. Illuminating our sampling

One of the main problems with sampling largely from herbarium specimens, rather than from material that has been specifically collected for DNA work (rapidly dried in silica gel…

Student projects at RBGE: DNA barcoding of the leafy liverwort genus Herbertus Gray in Europe and a review of the taxonomic status of Herbertus borealis Crundw.

University of Edinburgh/RBGE student David Bell, studying for the Masters degree in the Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants; thesis submitted August 2009. Supervisors: Dr David Long and Dr…

Student projects at RBGE: Barcoding British Liverworts: Metzgeria

University of Edinburgh/RBGE student Kimberley Fackler, studying for the Masters degree in the Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants; thesis submitted August 2013. Supervisors: David Bell, Dr David Long…

Student projects at RBGE: Barcoding British Liverworts: Plagiochila (Dumort.) Dumort.

University of Edinburgh/RBGE student Lucy Reed, studying for the Masters degree in the Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants; thesis submitted August 2011. Supervisors: Dr David Long, Dr Michelle…

Student projects at RBGE: DNA barcoding British liverworts: Lophocolea

University of Edinburgh Biotechnology student Kenneth McKinlay’s 4th year honours project, 2013. Supervisors: Dr David Long, Dr Laura Forrest Kenneth barcoded all six species of British Lophocolea, L….