Dianne Edwards facts for kids
Professor Dianne Edwards is a super smart scientist who studies really old plants. She's a palaeobotanist, which means she looks at plant fossils to learn how plants first started growing on land. She also studies how these early plants interacted with their environment. She was born in 1942.
Growing Up in Wales
Dianne Edwards was born in a place called Swansea, in South Wales. She spent a lot of her childhood at her parents' home on the beautiful Gower Peninsula.
Her Amazing Career
Professor Edwards' work focuses on very old plant fossils. Most of these fossils have been found right here in the UK. She first became interested in ancient plants when she saw fossils preserved in a mineral called pyrite, also known as "fools' gold." These fossils were special because they were preserved in 3D!
Much of her later research has been about fossils from the Rhynie chert. This is a special type of rock that has perfectly preserved ancient plants. She also studies tiny, charcoal-like fossils from the Welsh borderlands and South Wales.
Professor Edwards is a very important Research Professor at Cardiff University. She used to be the head of the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences there.
She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, which is a big honor for scientists. She's also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and an honorary Fellow at Swansea University. She even works with scientists in China, helping the Beijing Museum of Natural History and studying fossils from that country.
Incredible Discoveries
One of Professor Edwards' most important discoveries was finding special "vascular tissue" inside an ancient plant called Cooksonia. This tissue is like tiny pipes that carry water and food in plants. She also studied and described stomata (tiny pores for breathing) in early land plants. She even found very early plants that looked like modern liverworts.
Many of the fossils she studies are like charcoal. This helped her prove that huge wildfires happened way back in the Silurian period. That's a very long time ago!
She has also worked on some mysterious fossils like Nematothallus, Tortilicaulis, and Prototaxites. These fossils are still a bit of a puzzle to scientists.
Professor Edwards has also named many fossil plants herself or with others. Some examples include Danziella and Demersatheca.
Awards and Honors
Professor Edwards has received many important awards and honors for her work:
- She became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1996. This is one of the highest honors for a scientist in the UK.
- She was the President of the Palaeontological Association from 1996 to 1998.
- In 1999, she was given the CBE for her amazing contributions to Botany (the study of plants).
- She was a Trustee of the Natural History Museum in London.
- In 2004, she won the prestigious Lyell Medal.
- She is a founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. In 2010, she became its first Vice-President for Science, Technology, and Medicine.
- She was the President of the Linnean Society of London from 2012 to 2015.
- In 2014, she received an honorary PhD from Uppsala University in Sweden.
