| Citation | Dr Edwards is distinguished for her investigations into the nature of the earliest land plant fossils. By the skillful application of SEM, and the painstaking use of such techniques as the preparation of polished surfaces of pyritised plant tissue, she has elucidated the anatomy and morphology of numerous late Silurian and early Devonian plants and thrown new light on the evolutionary events surrounding the first colonisation of the land. In carefully documented field work in Wales, the Welsh Border, Scotland and other parts of the world she has greatly extended our knowledge of early land plant life, and added precision to the stratigraphic relationships on which the time scale of tracheophyte phylogeny is based. Together with students and other collaborators she has demonstrated the earliest known occurrences of vascular tissue, stomata and meiospores in situ in fossil plant organs, Above all, she has demonstrated an unexpected diversity in what has hitherto been regarded as a limited group of structurally simple, undistinguished Palaeozoic plants. |