Professor Dianne EdwardsCBE, FRS, FRSE, FLS, FLSW (born 1942[1]) is a palaeobotanist, who studies the colonisation of land by plants, and early land plant interactions.
. . . Dianne Edwards . . .
Edwards was born in Swansea, South Wales, and spent much of her time at her parents’ bungalow on the Gower Peninsula.[2]
Edwards’ work has centred on early plant fossils, the majority of which have been retrieved from the UK.[3] Her interest in early plants was initiated after she studied plant fossils preserved in three dimensions in the mineral pyrite (fools’ gold).[3]
Much of her later work has centred on the Rhynie chert and charcoalified fossils, large and microscopic, from the Welsh borderlands and South Wales.
Edwards is a Distinguished Research Professor, and former Head of School within the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, at Cardiff University.[4][5]
She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an honorary Fellow at the University of Wales, Swansea, a Corresponding Member of the Botanical Society of America, and has links with China, consulting for the Beijing Museum of Natural History, and working on fossils from that country.[6]
Among Edwards’s most notable works, are the discovery of vascular tissue in Cooksonia,[7] the description and analysis of stomata in early land plants,[8] and very early liverwort-like plants.[9] The charcoalified nature of many of her fossils have enabled her to prove that wildfires took place in the Siluruan period.[10] She has also worked on several enigmatic fossils such as Nematothallus,[11]Tortilicaulis[12] and Prototaxites.[13]
She is the author or co-author of a considerable number of botanical names of fossil plants, such as DanziellaD.Edwards (2006)[14] and DemersathecaC.-S. Li & D.Edwards (1996).[15]
. . . Dianne Edwards . . .