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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

WASHINGTON, April 24 (Reuters) - Flowering plants - from corn, wheat, rice and potatoes to maple, oak, apple and cherry trees as well as roses, tulips, daisies and dandelions and even the corpse ...

SCRAMBLING along a rough mountain trail, I am surrounded by strange trees clinging precariously to the slopes. With their etched and contorted trunks topped by jagged fronds and gaudy orange cones, ...

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 ...