That act includes teaching and research in the Department of Botany and the KU Natural History Museum, where they also will serve as curators of the paleobo- tanical collection they have brought with them. The collection includes more than 250,000 specimens, nine giant moving trucks full of fossil plants, mostly from Antarctica.
It's the largest collection of Antarctic fossil plants in the world other than the British Museum's and the second-largest collection of fossil plants of any kind in the United States.
Tom Taylor is only the second member of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of the nation's top scientists, ever to work at KU. Charles D. Michener, emeritus professor of entomology, was the first KU faculty member elected to the academy.
When the Taylors left the faculty of Ohio State University, they found in KU an apt home for the fossil plant collection and a home base for their continuing research, student training and collecting trips.
"One of the main drawing points of KU was the Natural History Museum," Edie Taylor said. "We put 20-plus years into collecting this material, and we're very gratified to see that the museum wants it and will keep it."
The feeling is mutual. "Very simply, the addition of Edie and Tom Taylor to the Natural History Museum makes the best better," Leonard Krishtalka, museum director, said. "The knowledge, student training and collections they bring to the museum and KU are world class. Their research reveals the grand stories of the history of life on Earth."
For now, the collection is being housed in Haworth Hall while space and financing are sought for a permanent home in the Natural History Museum. Edie Taylor's training in plant anatomy and an interest in tree rings led her to study paleoclimatology and the effect of climate on plant life, a timely concern because of possible global warming.
"Where are we going to look to see what the world was like when it was five degrees warmer?" she said, "The fossil record." The fossil record in Antarctica is especially appropriate for such study.
"We probably know less about plants of the Permian and Triassic periods than plants from any other period," Tom Taylor said. Specimens from these periods 190 million to 280 million years ago, when the Antarctic climate was temperate, are abundant there, he said, and it is one of the only places on Earth where plants have been preserved by permineralization, a process similar to petrifaction except that it preserves the cellular structure of the plants.
Tom Taylor's current research includes work on living fungi that haven't changed much since they appeared on Earth at least 400 million ago.
These fungi live in the roots of land plants, from which they get carbon, while they provide to the plant better water uptake and a more secure anchoring in the soil. This symbiotic relationship between the fungi and plants probably predates the first land plants and may have helped plants make the transition from life in water to life on land.
KU's new fossil collection is a boon for KU students as well. According to Edie Taylor, paleobotany is a superb topic for student research projects - even for undergraduate students - because the laboratory techniques are relatively easy to learn and because there are projects that can be accomplished in a relatively short time.
Their collection is also particularly valuable because of the difficulty and expense of collecting in Antarctica. "The U.S. government is about the only agency that can get you into where we go," Tom Taylor said.
The Taylors do much of their collecting in the Transantarctic Mountains about 500 miles from the South Pole. Their work is largely supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.
It is likely that collecting in Antarctica will become severely restricted, according to Edie Taylor, if proposals to make Antarctica a world reserve are implemented.
For now, though, the Taylors are continuing to collect. They'll go to Antarctica in November and spend the rest of the Antarctic spring there. When they come back to Lawrence for the Kansas spring, they'll teach - he, a paleobotany course and she, a course on the diversity of life - and continue to unpack the collection.