A 100-million-year old piece of amber has been discovered which reveals the oldest evidence of sexual reproduction in a flowering plant -- a cluster of 18 tiny flowers from the Cretaceous Period -- ...

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 ...

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 ...

This news release is available in Portuguese. A European and US consortium coordinated by Jorg Becker, group leader at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia (IGC; Portugal), has now received funding of ...

Recent advances in molecular phylogenetics and a series of important palaeobotanical discoveries have revolutionized our understanding of angiosperm diversification. Yet, the origin and early ...

This video segment adapted from NOVA explains how flowers play a central role in the reproductive cycle of plants. Their striking array of colors, patterns, fragrances, and nectar all require lots of ...

You might think flowers don’t have much choice about who they mate with, given they are rooted to the ground and can’t move. But when scientists from Nagoya, Japan used powerful microscopes to study ...

The colonisation of land by plants was one of the most important evolutionary steps on earth; it subsequently affected all other terrestrial evolutionary processes. Leaving the aquatic environment ...

In the flowering plant world, reproduction means an intricate succession of events. It begins when a pollen grain that carries the sperm cells lands on the top of the pistil, the female reproductive ...