Sandy Hetherington

Real pleasure to be invited to speak at the British Pteridological Society meeting today.
Brilliant mix of talks spanning evolution, conservation and botanical collections.
And always great to have a tour of the wonderful @thebotanics.bsky.social collections! 🌿

In Other Journals Editors’ selections from the current scientific literature

Thanks Bianca Lopez @science.org for highlighting our recent @newphyt.bsky.social paper led by @anajusagasti.bsky.social in this weeks "In Other Journals" section of Science #FossilFriday
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT📣: I haven’t been this excited to be part of something new in 15 years… Thrilled to reveal the passion project I’ve been working on for the past year and a half!🙀🥳 (thread 👇)

Sharing a beautiful photomicrograph of Trichormus variabilis, a nitrogen-fixing biofilm-forming cyanobacterium with long tangled filaments.🌀

Those eye-like structures made me feel "observed", a fun sort-of revenge from the microbial world.😯

#BiofilmCreate #BiofilmAware @ukbiofilms.bsky.social

YSF2025 Registration Form Welcome to the YSF2025 Registration and Abstract Submission form. This year the conference will be held online on Friday, November 14th 2025. We look forward to seeing old and new faces from across t...

Students (and recent graduates) working on anything phylogenetics, systematics or taxonomy-related, the abstract submission deadline for this year's (FREE ONLINE) Young Systematists' Forum approaches!

Send us your abstracts by Saturday, OCTOBER 25 11:59PM GMT+1

tinyurl.com/2w5n3e8

What a brilliant conference - thanks so much for the invitation to speak at Morph Up North, and for all the brilliant talks this afternoon!

Simons Postdoctoral Fellowships in Plant Biology Simons Postdoctoral Fellowships in Plant Biology on Simons Foundation

🌿 Amazing opportunity for scientists from any field to move into plant biology! I might host a fellow in the area of root-microbe or root-environment interactions (DM me). 👉 simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons-postdoctoral-fellowships-in-plant-biology

#PlantScience #ClimateChange #HarnessingPlants

A first dive in fern x pathogen interaction! More to come!

Congratulations @baptistebio.bsky.social @jacquet-chris.bsky.social et al.!

Excited to participate and talk about how quantitative imaging analyses using #MorphographX helped see things that I didn’t know! #MGX 🌱🧪

It's #FossilFriday! Great time to check out our new paper if you haven't yet.

#Palaeobotany #JurassicPlants

Photo showing the inside atrium of the new Life and Mind Building

Oxford Biology is growing 📢

We’re appointing 3 Associate Professors in:
🌱 Plant Sciences
🦉 Animal Behaviour
🔬 Molecular Cell Biology

3 fields. 3 opportunities. One new home for Oxford Biology.

Learn more 👉 bit.ly/41S2Tc7
Apply now 👉 bit.ly/488CNW3

Bryophytes hold a larger gene family space than vascular plants - Nature Genetics A super-pangenome analysis incorporating 123 newly sequenced bryophyte genomes reveals that bryophytes exhibit a larger number of unique and lineage-specific gene families than vascular plants.

Very important paper and resource. Bryophyte genomes expanded by one order of magnitude. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Page 11 of the Sunday Post. With story 'Fossil find is modern-day Jurassic spark'. The title image is of dinosaurs and below is an image of fossil wood, and a photograph of Anajú Sagasti and Sandy Hetherington

Our recent paper @newphyt.bsky.social @anajusagasti.bsky.social @instmolplantsci.bsky.social is featured today in the Sunday Post!
Thanks Sally McDonald for your piece helping to promote and communicate Scotland’s rich fossil heritage
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This wouldn’t have been possible without support from the @ukri.org @hfspo.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk – and the nurse log specimen is now accessioned into @ntlmuseumsscot.bsky.social 6/6

Our findings extend the fossil evidence for this key ecological strategy and importantly demonstrate the close evolutionary links between fungi, plants and animals for forest regeneration 5/6

Microscope image of fossil wood under the microscope with fossil rootlets and decaying wood evident

This decaying conifer wood preserves evidence of white pocket rot; two types of arthropod boring, likely by beetles and mites; and colonisation by small roots. It therefore preserved evidence of a rich ecosystem occurring on the floor of a Jurassic forest 4/6

Rocky coastline on sunny day with blue skye

Anajú Sagasti looking at fossil nurse log on the microscope

To investigate the prevalence of this strategy we searched for new fossil nurse logs and reviewed existing literature. We discovered the first nurse log from Scotland, and only the second known from the Jurassic Period 3/6

Small tree growing on rotting wood - termed a nurse log

Seedling establishment on the forest floor is a challenging process. Plants have therefore adapted to make use of dead wood as a seed bed. This decaying wood can act as a nursery for seedlings and is termed a nurse log.
In conifer forests today nurse logs support >90% of germinating seedlings 2/6

Decay stages of Jurassic wood debris from Scotland: evidence for the coevolution of fungal rot, arthropods and the nurse log strategy A key feature of extant conifer forests is the high percentage of seeds that germinate and establish on dead wood; in some forests, this can exceed 90%. This deadwood can act as an ideal nursery for...

Excited to share our recent paper @newphyt.bsky.social where we describe evidence of a Jurassic nurse log from Scotland! Great work led by @anajusagasti.bsky.social Sophie Burne and @jeremywyman.bsky.social @instmolplantsci.bsky.social
🧵 👇 1/6
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Really excited to be kicking off this series of Palaeobotany evening lectures at the Oxford University Botanic Garden. All are online and free to attend 👇👇

Slab of gray rock with black-to-orange impressions of branches and leaves.

UMMP 57588: specimen showing the Late Devonian genera Archaeopteris (fronds) and Callixylon (trunks, branches) belonged to the same plant. This critical discovery by UMMP curator Charles Beck illuminated the structure of trees contributing to some of the planet's most ancient forests. #FossilFriday

Group of 9 people standing on a red bridge in Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh

7 people standing in royal botanic gardens Edinburgh looking down at a small green plant - lycopodium clavatum

So great having @isabelmonte.bsky.social visiting Edinburgh. Thanks for a wonderful seminar and some great discussions. Really pleased the rain held off for a lovely walk round the Botanics - including the obligatory stop to see the Lycopodium clavatum 🪴 🌿 🍄 🦠

Our paper on rodent thumbnails is out! Big team effort, powered by museum collections. Turns out, nails can reveal a lot about rodent evolution. Shoutout to Dr. Gordon Shepherd for the wild idea to study rodents thumbs!

Recently, both our team and the Richardson/Estelle/Strader teams showed that ARF transcription factors are actively degraded. In this new preprint, Martijn de Roij explores the requirements and relevance of ARF degradation (1/7)

My department is hiring a Plant-Fungal Assist Prof!! As the newest #NewPI here, don't get me started on how wonderful my colleagues, how smooth my onboarding has been, how supportive the school and the department are, how nice my brand new lab is, and how convenient living in Champaign Urbana is!

Graphical illustration of the four key stages of edge evolution following edge creation.

We have a #Tansley review out today @newphyt.bsky.social led by Becky Banbury Morgan in which we put forward a new framework that aims to explain how and why edge effects on forest structure vary across ecosystems and through time

📜 doi.org/10.1111/nph....

Pollen diversity #3DThursday!🌼🌾 Thanks to Nat Prunet's careful microscopy, we see ridges, spikes & pores that reveal how plants spread & survive.
🔬: @zeiss-microscopy.bsky.social LSM 980, Airyscan 2
🥼: @nat-prunet.bsky.social
🏛️: UNC Biological Microscopy Core
🎬: syGlass.io v2.4.0 #syGlass

Huge congratulations to #early-career scientists working with plants awarded with ERC-2025-StG @ecologybasel.bsky.social @clemmar.bsky.social @izzysaurlab.bsky.social @pfeilmeier.bsky.social @jiorgoskourelis.bsky.social @vinayshukla.bsky.social

Honoured & excited that ‘Breathing Underground’ has been funded by the ERC!
This will let me explore one of the most fundamental questions of plant life: how roots breathe underground? @erc.europa.eu

Purple pollen visible in a dissected flower of Linum grandiflorum, flowering flax, an insect-pollinated species.

*Postdoc in Evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University*
We are recruiting a postdoc for a large interdisciplinary project to investigate evolutionary drivers and genomic consequences of pollen evolution in response to pollination mode shifts in flowering plants. 1/5

su.varbi.com/what:job/job...