Diversity and Evolution of Land Plants

"Diversity and Evolution of Land Plants" provides a treatment of plant anatomy and morphology for the biology undergraduate of today. Setting aside the traditional plod through the plant taxa, the author adopts a problem-based functional approach, exploring plant diversity as a series of different solutions to the design problems facing plant life on land. In seeking to present the vast topic of plant anatomy and morphology in one relatively brief text, the author relates plant diversity to evolutionary trends in structure, and links differences between plants to their physical and biotic environments. Evolutionary evidence discernible from fossil records is also drawn upon and compared with living forms to help students visualize structures in functional terms as adaptations. The inclusion of clear drawings and a glossary bring a practical flavour to the work which, together with its essentially anti-systematic approach, aims to blow away the dust which has settled on the teaching and learning of descriptive botany.