Episode 215 - Ferns

The Common Descent Podcast

Common Descent

Science, Education, Earth Sciences, Natural Sciences, Science:natural Sciences

4.8 • 764 Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2025

⏱️ 153 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With several thousand living species, ferns are the second most diverse vascular plants around today, after angiosperms. Ferns are also abundant and well-known in the fossil record. This episode, Aly joins us to explore the dizzying variety of ferns and their ferny-friends, past and present. In the news: When the Earth Was Green, weird wasps, and ancient claws. And also dire wolves. Time markers:Intro & Announcements: 00:00:00News: 00:04:20Main discussion, Part 1: 00:46:45Main discussion, Part 2: 01:37:00Patron question: 02:20:40 Check out our website for this episode’s blog post and more: http://commondescentpodcast.com/ Join us on Patreon to support the podcast and enjoy bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/commondescentpodcast When the Earth Was Green:https://bookshop.org/p/books/when-the-earth-was-green-plants-animals-and-evolution-s-greatest-romance-riley-black/21356911 https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781250354211-when-the-earth-was-green Find Riley at @restingdinoface.bsky.social And http://rileyblack.net/ Support links:Assigned Media: https://www.assignedmedia.org/ Got a topic you want to hear about? Submit your episode request here: https://commondescentpodcast.com/request-a-topic/ Lots more ways to connect with us: https://linktr.ee/common_descent The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome. More music like this at http://ocremix.org Musical Interludes are "Professor Umlaut" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Common Descent Podcast.
0:19.0	Hello, Will. Hello, David. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Common Descent a podcast about paleontology, evolution,
0:25.6	the history of life on earth, and sometimes plants.
0:28.5	This is episode 215.
0:30.4	It's one of those plants episodes.
0:31.7	This episode's topic is ferns.
0:34.6	We will spend this episode's main discussion talking about ferns, the plants that are ferns,
0:39.5	the plants that are near ferns.
0:41.8	Furns today, they're extinct relatives, which are abundant.
0:46.3	And there's a whole bunch of different things that go under the ferns umbrella.
0:50.4	Ferns are very strange and confusing.
0:52.4	Fortunately, we know a person who's better at this than we are.
0:56.6	Yep.
0:57.0	So as with all of our five episode plant topic episodes, we will be joined for the discussion
1:04.1	by our friendly neighborhood paleobotanist, Dr. Ali Baumgartner, who's going to inform us
1:09.7	what ferns are.
1:10.9	Yeah, very, very eager to learn because I know ferns are weird, and that's about the
1:17.4	extent of my knowledge.
1:18.5	And they're so prevalent in paleontology discussions, and there's lots of fossil ferns,
1:23.5	so this is going to be, there's a lot of relevance to it.
1:26.8	On top of that, it was requested.
1:29.3	Requests for ferns and fern cousins were made by Luke, Andrea, Lydia, Wayne, Morg, Jesse, Mad Jack, Jackie, Saturn, StarCat, Tony, Teoanosaurus, Cinder, Evan, Garrick, Malmo, Lauren,
	...

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