The Google doodle today celebrates the famous Berkeley botanist Ynes Mexía, who collected ~150,000 specimens and did much of her fieldwork alone, which is all the more impressive given that she didn’t start her botanical careers until she was in her 50s!
See more about her here, and here, and if that piques your interest, we are lucky enough to have her archives here at UC/JEPS.
This has been a summer of good news for senior Rlabites, and I’ve been belated in sharing. First, congratulations to Dori for landing the position of Paleobotanist at the Perot Museum! Not only is this an amazing position in a super cool museum, but it’s back in Dori’s native Texas, close to family. She couldn’t be happier, and we couldn’t be prouder!
Holy moly, Operation Desert Fern* III was an amazing, hot, exhausting, and successful trip to the mountains of southern Arizona at the end of July. While some would consider us crazy botanists for attempting such a trip in the pre-monsoon Desert Southwest, I would consider us crazy and happy botanists.
Our first stop (after a rather sweaty and sleepless first night camping west of the Santa Catalinas) was Finger Rock Canyon in the Santa Catalinas, just north of Tucson. This was our hottest field day, but in some ways the most exciting, as we met so many new ferns and were thrilled to discover that things were not as shriveled as expected! Apparently the canyon had received some early monsoon rains, so at least some of the plants were looking lively. That first day we saw Notholaena standleyi, Astrolepis sinuata, A. windhamii, Pellaea truncata, Myriopteris wrightii, M. lindheimeri, M. yavapensis, Selaginella arizonica, S. rupincola, and finally, at about 1136m in the afternoon, Pentagramma maxonii—these collections turned out to contain both diploid and triploid individuals! Yahoo!
Sraavya, superstar, spent her summer at an internship at Stanford working on cell signalling in the immune response to viral infection. Of course she did!! The Rothfels lab is very proud!
The new Jepson Herbarium plant video is pteribbly pterrific–see for yourself!