Jumping Genes Shaking the Tree of Life
Ferris Jabr, Aeon
Fay-Wei Li stepped out of his car and looked around. There was not much to see aside from an old wooden fence and a soggy ditch strewn with roadside detritus. Could this really be the spot? A biologist at Duke University, Li had driven seven hours from North Carolina to these exact coordinates in Florida in search of hornworts: the living descendants of some of the very first land plants.