Early flowering plants are thought to have been woody species restricted to warm habitats 1,2,3. This lineage has since radiated into almost every climate, with manifold growth forms 4. As angiosperms ...

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 ...

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

Paleontologists may be on the verge of solving one of the great mysteries in the history of life on our planet – the origin of angiosperms, the flowering plants. The importance of angiosperms cannot ...

This is a preview. Log in through your library . Abstract Genome size varies extensively across the flowering plants, which has stimulated speculation regarding the ancestral genome size of these ...

Difficulties in obtaining convincing angiosperm phylogenies are often attributed to widespread homoplasy among angiosperms. Direct evidence about homoplasy in individual characters can be obtained by ...

The discovery of exceptionally well-preserved, tiny fossil seeds dating back to the Early Cretaceous corroborates that flowering plants were small opportunistic colonizers at that time, according to a ...

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 ...

Angiosperms produce flowers and fruits, which contain their seeds. Scientists think they have the answer to a puzzle that baffled even Charles Darwin: How flowers evolved and spread to become the ...

They are very tiny, but they are a key source of information when it comes to Earth's evolutionary history: pollen grains are usually no larger than 20 micrometers, or 0.02 millimeters. Using these ...

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 ...