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 -- ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Self-incompatibility (SI) is a sophisticated reproductive strategy that prevents self-fertilisation and maintains genetic variability in flowering plants. This mechanism involves highly specific ...

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 ...