If the weather in northeast Kansas is just too hot for yard work, this might be the story for you. Jack Cameron gets to the root of a really cool story about really old plants.

For some Lawrence residents, ordinary household and yard plants just aren’t interesting enough. They like to find unusual plants. Rare plant parts. Really OLD roots. And so to Kansas University’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department. They go a long way from Lawrence to find their plant matter. Like Antarctica. One trip was a search for 240-million-year-old plant roots. They found them, too: ten thousand pounds worth of fossilized roots, brought back to K-U for study. Because of that haul, researchers now know a lot more about how plants and fungi related. And that’s opened a window into a remarkable, ancient symbiotic relationship – how the fungus obtained carbon from the plant and the plant got nutrients from the fungus. So, next time you have to dig up a root in your yard, give a thought to the Transantarctic Mountains – in the winter – and how far a Kansas researcher will go to get to the roots of science.