The two warmest time periods on Earth in the past 140 million years drove both mass extinctions and explosions in plant ...

Plants are crucial for life on land. The energy they capture from the Sun underpins the existence of almost all land-based ...

Plants can anticipate infection and time their immune attack accordingly, new research shows. Understanding that mechanism could help doctors time our own defenses better. In plants, this daily ...

A sampling-standardized analysis of fossil spore-pollen records shows that the two great pulses of land plant turnover in the ...

A variety of fossilized plant spores have been found in rocks from Western Australia that date from the early Ordovician era—approximately 480 million years ago. According to a paper published in ...

Next time you pass a wheat field on a dewy morning, you might want to say “gesundheit.” The flinging effect, which can happen on healthy plants too, is the result of a quirk of fluid dynamics: When ...

These are horsetails. They are hundred-and-fifty-million-year-old plants and the last of their kind. Instead of seeds, they give off spores. And instead of flying or swimming, these spores use ...

Sifting of organic residues from ancient rocks has netted a catch of tiny fossils that provide clues about when plant life first appeared on land. Spores are produced by land plants in prodigious ...