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 ...

Insect pollination is a decisive process for the survival and evolution of angiosperm (flowering) plants and, to a lesser extent, gymnosperms (without visible flower or fruit). There is a growing ...

Gymnosperms, like this Colorado blue spruce, are a group of nonflowering plants that emerged several hundred million years before flowering plants, or angiosperms, entered the evolutionary history of ...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY: Primary vascular tissues of angiosperm and gymnosperm roots have significant anatomical differences. In gymnosperms, lack of protophloem sieve elements indicates a lengthy ...

A defining feature of angiosperms is double fertilization involving the female gametophyte central cell and formation of a nutrient-storing tissue called endosperm. The route for the evolutionary ...

Researchers have uncovered the earliest example of a flower bud in a 164 million-year-old plant fossil in China. The discovery firmly pushes back the emergence of flowering plants into the Jurassic ...

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 ...

Excerpted from Garden of Marvels: How We Discovered that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of Plants by Ruth Kassinger, out now from William Morrow. Why flowers, anyhow? Plants began ...

The world's oldest preserved lily has been unearthed from a stone quarry in Brazil and dates back to around 115 million years ago. The fossil is exceptionally well-preserved — and includes the plant's ...