Fossils of angiosperms first appear in the fossil record about 140 million years ago. Based on the material in which these fossils are deposited, early angiosperms must have been weedy, fast-growing ...

Paleontologists may be on the verge of solving one of the great mysteries in the history of life on our planet – the origin of angiosperms, the flowering plants. The importance of angiosperms cannot ...

ARGUABLY the world’s weirdest plant, Welwitschia mirabilis is a tangled mass of shredded, fraying leaves in the Namib desert. For a thousand years, perhaps more, it grows just two long leaves, which ...

Angiosperms, also known as flowering plants, represent the most diverse group of seed plants, and their origin and evolution have long been a central question in plant evolutionary biology.

Almost every plant we eat has a flower, and flowering plants populate every corner of the planet. But many questions remain about how and when this vast group emerged throughout the history of life on ...

Botanists have mapped the evolutionary relationships between flowering plants using genomic data from more than 9500 species. The newly compiled tree of life will help scientists piece together the ...

The centerpiece of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, in Stockholm, is probably the Fossils and Evolution hall, in which an enormous Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton seems to yawn over crowds of ...

Sequencing of the water lily’s genome has shed light on the early evolution of angiosperms, flowering plants. Utilizing high-throughput next-generation sequencing technology, an international team of ...

A new study unveils the most comprehensive understanding of the evolutionary history of flowering plants to date. The research analyzed 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species ...

In the summer of 1973 sunflowers appeared in my father's vegetable garden. They seemed to sprout overnight in a few rows he had lent that year to new neighbors from California. Only six years old at ...