Lecture July 18 – Jurassic Garden: Decoding how to grow prehistoric plants

Jurassic Garden: Decoding how to grow prehistoric plants

with Jeffrey Benca

Saturday July 18, 2015 at 11:00 AM

100  Genetics & Plant Biology, UC Berkeley

Paleobotanist and UC graduate student Jeff Benca uses living and fossil members of ancient plant lineages to better understand the distant past. However, survivors of the 400-million year old group he studies (lycopods) have been deemed nearly impossible to grow for over a century. Learn more about these mysterious plants, and how cracking their cultivation code may have revealed a winning survival strategy.  

Primitive-plant uber-geek’s heart belongs to lycopods

 

Jeff Benca Jeff Benca is a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology. His dissertation focuses on the mechanism of global collapse and restructuring of plant communities during Earth’s largest mass extinction, ~252 million years ago.   This free public talk is presented as part of the monthly Science at Cal Lecture Series Event Contact: scroft@astro.berkeley.edu