Dr James Clark is prize fellow and lecturer at the Milner Centre for Evolution, University of Bath.

Deep in geological time, certain algae began the process of terrestrialisation and a new lineage arose: the land plants. This fundamentally shaped the Earth’s own evolution and resulted in the formation of a terrestrial biosphere. Our understanding of this event relies on our ability to retrace the evolution of plants from those alive today all the way back to their earliest ancestors. This is no small task and underpinning it is the “tree of life” that describes how the major groups of plants are related to each other, from flowering plants to diminuitive mosses. James will discuss how insights from the genomics revolution, new scientific approaches and the earliest plant fossils have fundamentally shifted our view of plant evolution all the way back to the first plants.