Hello everyone and welcome to the Indefensive Plants Podcast, the official podcast of

indefensiveplants.com. What's up? This is your host Matt, welcome to the show. How's everyone

doing this week? Today we're going to be diving into the evolutionary history of gymnosperms

and we're going to be doing it through the lens of genetics. But as you're going to hear,

the kinds of conclusions you can make relies on more than just DNA. It involves fossil evidence,

current evidence, actual field botany, those sorts of things. Joining us to talk about this

is Dr. Greg Stoll. He is an evolutionary plant biologist who is currently specializing on the

evolutionary history of gymnosperms. And what you're going to hear is pretty remarkable and it

tells a much more interesting story than I ever imagined. So I don't want to keep you from it any

longer. Let's just jump right into it without further ado. Here's my conversation with Dr. Stoll.

I hope you enjoy.

All right, Dr. Greg Stoll. It is so great to have you on the podcast. I'm really excited to

talk to you today. So first, let's start out by introducing yourself. Tell everyone a little

bit about who you are and what it is you do. Yeah, thanks for the introduction. It's awesome to

be here. So yeah, my name is Greg and I am a evolutionary plant biologist. I am broadly interested

in the evolutionary history of plants. So when major groups originated, how and why are they

diversified and spread across the earth, how they have been impacted by climate change and other

geologic events? And I'm interested in it from different perspectives. And so I study the fossil

records. I'm kind of part paleo botanist, but then I also sequence DNA and use that to build

phylogenic trees showing how species are related and kind of try to integrate that to get a

a nice picture of plant evolution and kind of a broad sense. Yeah, it's really awesome. And

one of the main reasons I was excited to get you on is you go through your Google Scholar page when

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