Whether or not he was ever asked by an Anglican bishop for his thoughts on the nature of the Creator, the English evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane’s response is legendary. The Creator, Haldane allegedly replied, seemed to have “an inordinate fondness for beetles.” But did He have a grudge against ferns? There are relatively few fern species especially when compared with the riot of biodiversity displayed by angiosperms today.
A new discovery might help explain the fern family’s slow “speciation clock.” Carl Rothfels, a postdoc from the University of British Columbia working in the Duke University lab of Kathleen Pryer, has found evidence in the genome of a fern from the French Pyrenees, xCystocarpium roskamianum, of a deep time “intergeneric hybridization event” between two lineages that separated roughly 60 million years ago. “This is an extraordinarily deep hybridization event,” the researchers say, “roughly akin to an elephant hybridizing with a manatee or a human with a lemur.” It suggests to Rothfels et al. that the limited diversity of ferns may be an indirect by-product of their own slower “speciation clock,” rather than the speed with which angiosperms, for example, have evolved innovative adaptations. Their paper first appeared in American Naturalist. A commentary by Tom Ranker and Michael Sundue is in Trends in Plant Science.
About the Author:
John Fleischman was the ASCB Senior Science Writer from 2000 to 2016. Best unpaid perk of the job? Working with new grad students and Nobel Prize winners.