It's difficult to peer into the past to see the first flowering plant, but Charlie Scutt shows how an ancestor in the modern-era provides some clues as to what it looked like.
Amborella trichopoda, the sister species of all other extant angiosperms, is typically dioecious, producing male and female flowers on separate individuals. Anger et al. map sex phenotypes onto a phylogeny of basally...
Dormancy mechanisms act to optimise the timing of seed germination for many seed plants. Fogliani et al. demonstrate that the New-Caledonian shrub Amborella trichopoda exhibits a type of morphophysiological dormancy in...
Rare and monotypic Amborella is probably the living β extant β flowering plant closest evolutionarily to the first true member of the angiosperm group.