May 17, 2025:  The 42nd Mid-Continent Paleobotanical Colloquium at Wesleyan University in Middletown Connecticut. This one day meeting changes venue every year, and this year I presented a short review of our recent work on the Hirnantian of Saudi Arabia entitled, "The co-occurrence of Zygnema and a land plant spore in latest Ordovician deposits indicates “some (genomic) assembly required”

April 20-28, 2025:  Attended the 57th annual meeting of AASP-The Palynological Society in Rabat, Morocco. Strother and Taylor presented papers on palynology of the Hirnantian of Saudi Arabia as part of the CIMP-ARAMCO Working Group.

April 16-20, 2025:  Visit with Bas van de Schootbrugge at Utrecht University, (with W. Taylor, C. Foster & C. Wellman) we will be working on the recognition of Circulisporites in non-marine Precambrian deposits. This palynomorph has morphological similarities with euglenoid cysts (see,  Recognition of an extended record of euglenoid cysts: Implications for the end-Triassic mass extinction,)

March 24 2025: A new publication, "A freshwater palynological assemblage from the Hirnantian of Saudi Arabia," is available as a pdf download. This work documents some of the earliest known examples of freshwater chlorophyte and charophyte algae, including zygospores of Zygnema thought to be the closest living algal relative to the land plants. The research is part of a collaboration between CIMP and ARAMCO,

November 19, 2024: A volume published in memory of Cedric Shute, former curator of Palæobotany at the Natural History Museum in London (formerly the British Museum of Natural History) has now been published in the Czech journal, Fossil Imprint. Our paper on Cambrian cryptospore wall ultrastructure (including the oldest known specimens to date) is included in the memorial volume. A copy of this work, Taylor & Strother. 2024. Ultrastructure of Cambrian cryptospores and the early evolution of the plant spore wall. Fossil Imprint 80(1), 90-106. DOI: 10.37520/fi.2024.009 is available as a .pdf download.

July 22, 2024: A new review article, A Fossil Record of Spores before Sporophytes, co-authored with Wilson Taylor is now published and freely available on-line. The review is part of a special issue of the journal, Diversity, edited by Yin-Long Qiu and Lang Liu. This paper is a synthesis of ideas that Taylor and I have been presenting at meetings over the past several years.

June 10-16: Music residency at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Loughborough, Virginia. The band was in residence for a week to pilot a future music residency program at the Oak Spring Garden. The Oak Spring Garden Foundation, headed by paleobotanist, Sir Peter Crane, is a non-profit foundation promoting regional culture and "...facilitating scholarship and public dialogue on the history and future of plants." 

The recordings from the Oak Springs Garden Sessions are now available.

February 26: Plant Evolution: A Tapetum is now effectively present in all plant lineages by WA Taylor & PK Strother has been published as a Dispatch article in Current Biology. This commentary discusses the impact on evolution of the plant spore wall based on the research from John Bowman's Lab, Levins J., Dierschke T. & Bowman J.L. A subclass II bHLH transcription factor in Marchantia polymorpha gives insight into the ancestral land plant trait of spore formation. Curr. Biol. 2024; 34: 895-901. 

Research at the Palæobotany Laboratory at Weston Observatory investigates several related Evolutionary Themes - all of which concern fossil protists extracted from the geological record. The origin of Land Plants in the SIlurian, was preceded by a record of cryptospores that extends from Cambrian Series 2, and we are responsible for creating the taxonomy of many of the cryptospores of Cambrian and Ordovician age. Together with coworkers at Utrecht University and elsewhere, we are in the early stages of documenting a fossil record of the Euglenophyceae - the photosynthetic euglenoids. Lakes through Time is our program that includes Precambrian and Palæozoic non-marine deposits - primarily the Mid-Continent Rift Nonesuch Shale and the Torridonian Sequence in Scotland. The discovery of fossil holozoans in phosphate nodules of the Diabaig shales at Loch Torridon in Scotland has opened up a new research line into the origins of cell differentiation and development in the unicellular ancestors of the animals.

"In short, if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites." (Cobb 1914)

"Comparative anatomy is largely the story of the struggle to increase surface in proportion to volume." (Haldane 1928, p.23)

Paul K. Strother

email: strother@bc.edu

Palæobotany Laboratory

Weston Observatory of Boston College

381 Concord Rd

Weston, Massachusetts MA02493