Underground trees, a type of geoxyles occurring in Afrotropical savannas and grasslands, have unique and diverse ways of surviving in tough environments, according to recent research.
Botanists have tried to understand the conditions that led to the evolution of the first flowers by reconstructing the niches from which the earliest flowering plants diverged.
Large-scale environmental changes such as aridification have shaped and continue to influence the evolution and composition of biomes. As conditions change, organisms may persist in some parts of their ranges, become...
The assertion that plants at lower latitudes should be better defended against enemies has a long historical basis but is still controversial. In the current study, Bogdziewicz et al. explore the interaction among holm...
Interactions between flowering plants and their pollinators are known to be responsible for part of the tremendous diversity of the angiosperms, currently thought to number at least 350,000 species. Using a new database...
When you look at a patch of flowers, you often see clusters of colour. Even when a single species can have many different colours, you get patches. Why? How does a plant know to grow with this colour and not that colour...
Eurasian bee orchids (Ophrys, Orchidaceae) have become the most popular model system for studying reproduction via insect-mediated pseudo-copulation and for exploring the consequent, putatively adaptive, evolutionary...
Climatic changes and historical orogenies during the Quaternary might have played a significant role in determining the speciation and diversification patterns of primroses in Japan.
Geographic distributions of species are constrained by their ecological requirements. Chozas et al. study the distribution, environmental responses and evolutionary relationships of the three species of the genus...