Plants, The First Three Billion Years: A Reflection on the Nature of Evolutionary History

Plant biodiversity. How did it all begin? And what are some of the key evolutionary twists and turns that have deposited us into a world teaming with photosynthetic life? Join us as we explore how lunch for a unicellular organism inadvertently laid the groundwork for the first plants, and how they then went on to produce exquisitely beautiful multicellular photosynthetic lineages dozens of times, only one of which made it out of the water and onto land 475 million years ago. And finally, we will reflect on what might have been (and what might be) if one or two of these twists and turns had gone differently in evolutionary history.
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