Plants

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.

Henon bamboo flowers only once every 120 years then vanishes for years, and researchers have no idea how it regenerates.

The food giant Del Monte has created a genetically engineered pink pineapple that owes its rosy hue to higher concentrations of a pigment called lycopene.

Data collected by the International Space Station has revealed a small fraction of leaves in the world's tropical rainforests are already exceeding peak temperatures, and scientists warn that this could increase.

Gibbaeum heathii is endemic to a valley in South Africa that is surrounded by mountains and receives very little rainfall, allowing a huge range of succulent species to thrive. This bababoutjies — or baby's bum — is one of them.

Plants are capable of producing seedless fruit through a process called parthenocarpy, and humans have long leveraged it in agriculture.