Lycophytes, Quillworts & the "Great Dying"

Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't

I became fixated on lycophytes because of some of the cool desert-dwelling members of the genus Selaginella, not to mention the utterly weird "clubmosses" that thrive in places as disparate as Northern Wisconsin and the slopes of volcanoes in New Zealand, but in this episode botanist Jeff Benca tells us about his work with relatives of the genus Isoetes ("Quillworts") and how their 250 million year old relatives might have been able to survive the biggest extinction in Earth's history, otherwise known as the Permian Extinction or "The Great Dying".