This article describes a discovery of moss and ostracod fossils that led to a better understanding of Antarctica's climate history.

Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Identify the main characteristics of bryophytesDescribe the distinguishing traits of liverworts, hornworts, and mossesChart the development of land adaptations in the bryophytesDescribe the events in the bryophyte lifecycle

This article describes glaciologist Lonnie Thompson's discovery of an ancient plant in Peru. It also illustrates some important characteristics of good science that can be seen even in a serendipitous discovery.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Mosses are ubiquitous in northern ecosystems. Their critical ecological roles include insulating soils, maintaining soil moisture, and mediating carbon and nitrogen cycles. Like all plants, mosses associate with microbes and some of them are key contributors to nitrogen dynamics through their nitrogen fixation functions. To better understand the importance of moss host species and environmental factors in structuring these microbial communities, researchers studied 26 boreal and tundra moss species across 24 sites in Alaska. They found that both host species and host evolutionary history predicted moss microbiome composition, and microbe nitrogen fixation rates also varied by host species. To a lesser extent, light availability and temperature also influenced the composition and function of moss microbes. Finally, they identified putative nitrogen-fixing bacteria specific to some moss hosts, including some outside well-studied cyanobacterial clades..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.