At Cuttings HQ we love a new botany journal – even if it’s technically described as a serial. So, we were really pleased to find out about The Global Flora, whose first issue was launched in January 2018. Published by...
Tag - Evolution
Nigel Chaffey
Brand new 3.7 billion years old stromatolites
One of the most ancient forms of life on the planet might be more common than we thought.
RAD-seq and morphology clarify evolutionary relationships in Eurasian bee orchids
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...
botanyone
Meet the meat-munching plants
Carnivorous Plants: Physiology, ecology, and evolution edited by Aaron Ellison and Lubomír Adamec, 2017. Oxford University Press. Famously, Charles Darwin’s opinion of the Venus fly-trap is used to embrace his view of...
All the world’s plants are in here (well, almost…)
Plants of the World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Vascular Plants by Maarten JM Christenhusz, Michael F Fay and Mark W Chase, 2017. Kew Publishing/University of Chicago Press. One of the great botanical pleasures I...
Unexpected flowers in the Jurassic
Did flowering plants appear earlier than the fossil record indicates? Two papers independently conclude they did - and suggest what fossil evidence we should look for.
Alun Salt
Integrative approaches to understanding angiosperm origins and diversity
The rise of angiosperms should be studied as part of the global increase in biodiversity.
Adaptation in the root epidermis: the velamen radicum
Zotz and colleagues ask for a re-evaluation of the occurrence, evolution, and function of the velamen radicum in both terrestrial and epiphytic angiosperms
3 Ways To Investigate Herbicide Resistance In Weeds
How does the evolution of herbicide resistance relate to plant physiology? A new paper in AoB PLANTS suggests a few ways to find out.
AoBPLANTS
Evolution of pollination systems involving edible trichomes in orchids
Edible trichomes have been recorded in several plant families. However, food hairs have not been recorded among the Catasetinae, a subtribe of Orchidaceae. In a recent article published in AoB PLANTS, Pansarin and...
Intraspecific floral scent variation in the context of evolutionary ecology
Floral scents attract pollinators, and a varied repertoire of floral scents has been documented among plant species. Delle-Vedove et al. survey the results of 81 studies investigating intraspecific variation of floral...
Sex-specific functional traits in cycads
The Mesozoic is often referred to as the “age of cycads”. During this period, dinosaurs roamed vast cycad forests, yet modern cycads are a vestige of their Mesozoic glory. Extant species represent the oldest lineage of...
Polyploidy and interspecific hybridization shape adaptation, speciation and evolution
About half of all higher plant species are recognizable as evolutionarily recent polyploids, where multiple whole genomes or sets of chromosomes have come together from close ancestors. Additionally, over evolutionary...
Hooray for the hydathode!
There's more than one way for a pathogen to gain access to healthy leaf.
