Taking into account the relative paucity of knowledge about rDNA organisation in most gymnosperms despite the rather reduced size of the group (1000 gymnosperm versus 250 000 angiosperm species), we ...

Plants tend to hoard DNA, not throwing anything out. The extra genes they hold inside can mutate to produce new physical traits. Holding onto the extra genes increases the tempo of evolution for the ...

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 ...

The origin of flowering plants, or angiosperms, stands as one of evolutionary biology's great enigmas. Scientists know that they diverged from the seed-bearing plants, or gymnosperms, at least 150 ...

Determining the major drivers of species diversification and phenotypic innovation across the Tree of Life is one of the grand challeges in evolutionary biology. Facilitated by the Germplasm Bank of ...

Named for Charles Darwin, the only known specimen of a newly discovered beetle, Darwinylus marcosi, died in a sticky gob of tree sap some 105 million years ago in what is now northern Spain. As it ...

The flowering plants (also called angiosperms) are the dominant and most familiar group of land plants. The flowering plants and the gymnosperms comprise the two groups in the seed plants. The flowers ...

For many years, Charles Darwin was haunted by flowers. In 1859, the naturalist published his most famous work, On the Origin of Species, the book that is generally regarded as the foundation of ...

The world as we know it today is almost inconceivable without the rich and colourful landscapes created by plant life. Among them are flowering plants, or angiosperms, which are by far the most ...

The discovery of a beetle and pollen in 105-million-year-old Spanish amber is proof of a new insect pollination mode that dates to the mid-Mesozoic, before the rise of flowering plants. The study ...