In Defense of Plants Podcast

Ep. 595 - Disrupt Plants, Disrupt Life: A Climate Change Story

Sep 13, 2026
Regan Dunn, a paleobotanist and La Brea Tar Pits curator, explores how fossil plants reveal Earth’s most dramatic ecological upheavals. She discusses reconstructing ancient forests from pollen and leaf fragments, fern surges after catastrophe, migrating plants during warming, and forest structure’s role in supporting life. Deep-time evidence connects climate change, megafaunal extinction, wildfires, and modern ecosystem tipping points.
Ask episode
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
INSIGHT

Plants Reveal Climate Change From The Bottom Up

  • Climate changes vegetation first, and animals then respond to habitat and food-web disruption.
  • Fossil records provide natural experiments that complement models by showing what past warming actually did.
INSIGHT

Pollen Turns Rock Into A High Resolution Timeline

  • Fossil leaves reconstruct climate, while abundant pollen enables unusually fine-grained ecological timelines.
  • Researchers can sample centimeter by centimeter, sometimes resolving changes across decades, centuries, or millennia.
INSIGHT

Fern Spikes Record Ancient Ecological Disturbance

  • Researchers locate major events geologically, then track immediate botanical responses through pollen, spores, and other microscopic remains.
  • Fern spikes repeatedly mark disturbance after events including the dinosaur impact and major mass extinctions.
Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode
Get the app