Virtual Fossil Museum

Science writer Ruth Kassinger, who specializes in botany, covers the entire range of algae. They include blue-green algae (the oxygen-producing, photosynthetic cyanobacteria), red and green algae (close relatives of land plants), and distantly related groups such as diatoms, coccolithophores (responsible for chalk deposits such as the White Cliffs of Dover), dinoflagellates and kelp. Kassinger rightly describes algae as “the most powerful organisms on the planet” — not least for the amount of carbon dioxide they ‘fix’, or turn into organic matter. She sets out to educate us on their importance and compelling interest.

The Technology Cambrian Explosion

Fossil Museum on Evolution

About the fossil record

March for Science

The March for Science was organized shortly after US President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, largely in response to widespread alarm about his administration's attitude toward science. Trump has repeatedly called global warming a “hoax” and promised to roll back numerous environmental protection laws. And in March, the White House released a budget proposal that included double-digit cuts to agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health.

Also see: Virtual Fossil Museum Fossil Sites

March for Science - April 2017. The lower left is particularly terrifying.

Why we don’t kill mockingbirds.

Flowering plants (angiosperms) appear fairly late in geologic time, during the time of dinosaurs some 120 million years ago in the Cretaceous. They are now the dominant plant type with some 0.3 million species known. Symbiosis (mutualism) and co-evolution is common across the tree of life, and bees and angiosperm have a real cozy co-dependence - the bees get food, and the plants get sex. 

Cooksonia sp Primitive vascular plant or (Tracheophyte) and, Eurypterus remipes, or Sea Scorpion, Arthropod Subphylum Chelicerata Geologic Time: Silurian Fossil Site: Bertie Group, Buffalo, New York Comments: This association of plant and animal from the Silurian is extremely rare in the fossil record. The early (vascular?) plant, Cooksonia, is associated with an Eurpterus exoskeleton. This species is one of the earliest forms of terrestrial flora, from a time that plants were first evolving features for land-based living. The plant was growing on the discarded molt of a sea scorpion.