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All right. On with the show.

Hello everyone and welcome to the

Indefensive Plants podcast, the official podcast of Indefenseantz.com. What's up? This is your host,

Matt. Welcome to the show. How's everyone doing this week? Today we're talking about plant

evolution and some surprising revelations that have been made by my friend Dr. Miao Sun. I met Dr.

Sun many years ago through our late

friend Dr. Mark Whitten, and we've kept in touch ever since. And he's got a deep passion for plants,

but he's also doing some incredible work trying to understand the evolutionary history of some of the

major clades. Today he's a postdoc at RS University and Denmark, and he's working on building

and using large-scale phylogenetic trees

to explore the evolutionary and ecological patterns as it relates to things like paleo-climate,

biogeography, and the evolution of some of our most familiar plant species living today.

Recently, he and his colleagues just published work, revealing some amazing insights into the evolution of the rosid clade. Now, this is a

huge clay of plants, and again, it contains many familiar members, but they've just introduced the

idea that the rosids have been evolving much faster in the temperate zone than they have in the

tropics, which really bucks a lot of ideas as it relates to biodiversity and climate zones. You know,

we normally think of the tropics as the breeding ground for untold numbers of organisms,

but this research provides evidence that that's not always the case,

and that many of the most familiar plants to us actually got their start in the temperate zones.

...