A fossil plant smaller than a fingernail, collected more than a century ago from a Scottish rock bed, is reshaping the story ...

Researchers have discovered that plants benefit from a greater variety of interactions with pollinators and herbivores. Plants that are pollinated by insects and have to defend themselves against ...

Seed plants are essential as a source of food, fuel, medicine, and more. Now, a multidisciplinary team of researchers has combined deep botanical knowledge with powerful genomic technology to decode ...

The evolutionary history and phylogenetic relationships of seed plants have long captivated botanists and palaeobiologists alike. Recent investigations elucidate the mechanisms underlying key ...

This rainforest tree solved one of evolution’s hardest problems. Here’s how it evolved to use tension and geometry to fire ...

The absence of large herbivores after the extinction of the dinosaurs changed the evolution of plants. The 25 million years of large herbivore absence slowed down the evolution of new plant species.

Evolution has long been viewed as a rather random process, with the traits of species shaped by chance mutations and environmental events — and therefore largely unpredictable. But an international ...

Gymnosperm means “naked seed” and comes from the same Greek root as gymnastics, which means to exercise naked. This group of plants is so named because the seeds are not enclosed inside an ovary, ...

The Venus flytrap Dionaea muscipula is the most sophisticated of the carnivorous plants. Its traps snap shut in a fraction of a second, imprisoning prey in a cage of teeth that line the edges of the ...

The evolution of seeds transformed life on earth and is responsible for our most important food crops. Gymnosperms, the oldest living seed plants, are an untapped genomic reservoir for genes involved ...