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 ...

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 ...

Trees are typically organized into two categories: hardwoods (angiosperms) and softwoods (gymnosperms). A new study suggests that there is a third type of wood—known as “midwood”—that could explain ...

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 ...

One of the great mysteries of evolutionary biology is how, 150 or more million years ago, modern-day angiosperms (flowering plants) diverged from their closest relatives, the gymnosperms (seed-bearing ...

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 ...

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 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 ...