I’m sad to report that Lynn Margulis died this evening*. I was lucky enough to take two classes with her when I was an undergraduate at UMass; Environmental Evolution and a Symbiosis seminar. Although she was best known for her work on the endosymbiotic theory–the now generally accepted idea that mitochondria, chloroplasts, and other organelles within eukaryotic cells were once free-living bacteria–her research and her courses covered essentially all the living and nonliving things on earth and the interactions among them.
