"If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, it would astound us. "The fantastic seeds skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys brought with them an amazing adaptability," Eiseley writes. Unlike the static, towering green vegetation of the dinosaurs' world, this new plant life managed to encase its genetic imprint in suddenly mobile casings called angiosperm (or "encased seeds").īorne on the wind or attached to animal hides, the new plant life blanketed the world, and mutated its way into countless new settings. At the heart of the explosion was a new kind of flora. In his essay "How Flowers Changed the World," the American naturalist Loren Eiseley describes what he calls "a soundless, violent explosion" of seed-born plant life millions of years ago, just as the Age of Reptiles started to draw toward its own apparently violent close in the late Cretaceous Era. This summer, NPR.org talks with authors about their favorite buttonhole books in the weekly series "You Must Read This." All readers have them - and so do writers. Call them buttonhole books, the ones you urge passionately on friends, colleagues and passersby.
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