“Key Issues in Angiosperm Evolution from a Paleontological Perspective with some Biographical Marginalia”

William L. Crepet- Professor in Plant Biology 

Thursday, Sept. 17th from 10:30-11:30am- In Person & Zoom

Description: Flowering plants anchor the world’s ecosystems at nearly every latitude and altitude. They are by far the most numerous group of land plants, and they supply most of our food, the wood and fiber behind the construction and fashion industries, the fodder for our agriculture, and the chemical basis of most important medicines. Yet their own history remains rife with uncertainty — a puzzle Darwin himself flagged in the late nineteenth century and one that is still only partly resolved. This talk traces what we have learned about the origin and rapid rise of the angiosperms, and describes my own group’s contribution to that story. To make it accessible to those outside the field, I will build the account around an analogy drawn from twentieth-century industrial history — one that turns out to have a few connections to my own family.

Bio: William L. Crepet is Professor in the Plant Biology Section of Cornell’s School of Integrative Plant Science and Curator of the Cornell Paleobotanical Collections. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale in 1973 and joined the faculty of the University of Connecticut, where he became founding Head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He came to Cornell in 1990 as Chair of the L. H. Bailey Hortorium in the  Division of Biological Sciences, later chairing the Department of Plant Biology and the Plant Biology Section. He was principal architect of the School of Integrative Plant Science, work recognized by a New York State Chancellor’s Award for Excellence, and led the Mellon Foundation’s national initiative in systematic botany training, whose graduates now hold faculty positions across the country.

His research concerns the fossil record of flowering plants — Cretaceous fossil flowers, the origins and consequences of insect pollination, and the deeper question of seed plant relationships — and has been published in Science, Nature, PNAS, and the American Journal of Botany, among some 150 papers. He has been Keynote Speaker at the International Paleontological Convention in London and the Ermine Cowles Case Memorial Lecturer at Michigan, has served as a consultant to the BBC and a source for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Science, and is a Fellow of the Explorers Club. He also teaches an undergraduate course in forensic botany.