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Fossils locked away for 1.75 billion years hold clues about key moment in Earth's historyFossils from Australia provide the first direct evidence that photosynthesis was happening at least 1.75 billion years ago.
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'Few insect orders have been spared': Why death by parasite keeps life in the forest thriving"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."
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California redwoods 'killed' by wildfire come back to life with 2,000-year-old budsNew buds are sprouting through the charred remains of California redwoods that burned in 2020, suggesting the trees are more resilient to wildfires than thought.
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Mysterious hybrid species discovered hiding among 144-year-old 'zombie seeds' from secretive experimentScientists 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.
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Why do leaves change color in the fall?Plants draw on a suite of pigments to produce energy from sunlight, and in the fall, some become more obvious than others.
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Asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs allowed flowers to thrive in a post-apocalyptic worldScientists 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.
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Mystery of 'living fossil' tree frozen in time for 66 million years finally solvedThe 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.
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'Once again, innovation and proliferation ended with catastrophe': The environmental disaster of plants taking over the worldThe 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.
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Mysterious bamboo regeneration baffles scientists ahead of once-in-a-century blooming eventHenon bamboo flowers only once every 120 years then vanishes for years, and researchers have no idea how it regenerates.
