Julian Herting

I am an evolutionary biologist interested in the macroevolution of angiosperms and conifers. I am especially interested in the evolution of the flower, its trait evolution and the driving factors of floral evolution. My current research focusses on Ericales and how incorporating fossil flowers into trait evolution analyses may help disentangle floral evolution.

I did my PhD at the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany, on the evolution and morphology of the conifer seed cone. Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the National Herbarium of New South Wales at Mt Annan of the Royal Botanic Gardens Domain Trust.

Projects

Floral evolution of Ericales

In this project funded by the German research foundation (DFG) I, together with Hervé Sauquet and Jürg Schönenberger, want to unravel the floral evolution of Ericales as part of the eFLOWER project. We are interested in questions such as: What are the traits of the ancestral flowers of the families of Ericales and Ericales themselves? Where do the fossil Ericales flowers fit in the Ericales phylogeny? How does the inference of ancestral flowers change when fossils are included?

Ericales, heather and allies, comprise several well-known and used plants such as kiwi-fruit, tea, ebony, khaki, heather, and Rhododendron. They are a well-suited study group for these questions due to their rich fossil record of fossil flowers from the Cretaceous and their large extant diversity of flower morphologies and species.

Selected publications

Profile of a flower: How rates of morphological evolution drive floral diversification in Ericales

Herting, J., Schönenberger, J., & Sauquet, H. (2022). Profile of a flower: How rates of morphological evolution drive floral diversification in Ericales and angiosperms. Am J Bot. Accepted Author Manuscript. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajb2.16213

The ancestral conifer cone: What did it look like? a modern trait-evolution approach

Herting, J., Stützel, T., & Klaus, K. V. (2020). The ancestral conifer cone: What did it look like? a modern trait-evolution approach. International Journal of Plant Sciences, 181(9), 871–886. https://doi.org/10.1086/710489