Oak Origins - From Acorns to Species and the Tree of Life

From ancient acorns to the forests of the future, the story of how oaks evolved and the many ways they shape our world. An oak begins its life with the precarious journey of a pollen grain, then an acorn, then a seedling. A mature tree may shed millions of acorns, but only a handful will grow. One oak may then live 100 years, 250 years, or even 13,000 years. But the long life of an individual is only a part of these trees- story. With naturalist and leading researcher on the deep history of oaks Andrew L. Hipp as our guide, Oak Origins is a sweeping evolutionary history, stretching back to a population of trees that lived more than fifty million years ago. We travel to ancient tropical Earth to see the ancestors of the oaks evolving in the shadows of the dinosaurs. We journey from the once-warm Arctic forests of the oaks- childhood to the montane cloud forests of Mexico and the broadleaved evergreen forests of southeast Asia. We dive into current research on oak genomes to see how scie