Plant news, features and articles

Rare tree fossils preserved with their leaves have an architecture unlike any plant known today and represent the earliest evidence of smaller trees growing beneath the forest canopy.

Fossils discovered on Barro Colorado Island suggest central Panama was once home to a vast mangrove forest that was preserved when a volcanic mudflow buried it 23 million years ago.

Fossils from Australia provide the first direct evidence that photosynthesis was happening at least 1.75 billion years ago.

"The fungus swiftly colonizes and liquefies the caterpillar's delicate innards via powerful enzymes that pervade the creature's entire body cavity, effectively consuming the caterpillar from the inside out."

New buds are sprouting through the charred remains of California redwoods that burned in 2020, suggesting the trees are more resilient to wildfires than thought.

Scientists participating in one of the longest-running active scientific experiments have discovered a surprising hybrid plant hiding among seeds buried at a secret location on a university campus since 1829.

Plants draw on a suite of pigments to produce energy from sunlight, and in the fall, some become more obvious than others.

Scientists have discovered flowering plants were largely unscathed by the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event 66 million years ago, allowing them to take advantage of the new, dinosaur-free planet.

The Wollemi pine was thought to have gone extinct 2 million years ago until it was rediscovered by a group of hikers in 1994. Now, scientists have decoded its genome to understand how it's survived — almost unchanged — since the time of the dinosaurs.

The evolutionary leap that allowed plants to live on land 400 million years ago upended Earth in a way unseen since the Great Oxidation Event over 1.5 billion years earlier.