Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

A new species of monkey flower has been found in Scotland, the product of a tryst between two foreign flowers. But this is no ordinary love child. While almost all such hybrids are sterile — just as ...

Until not that long ago, scientists widely agreed on the evolutionary journey that plants took from the oceans to the land. They thought that algae evolved into mosses and their relatives, known as ...

The South African Restionaceae make up a highly diverse group of genera displaying several reductive trends in the configuration of the flower, especially in the gynoecium. In this paper the floral ...

The overarching goal of this recently funded research project is to understand how the structure of genetic and developmental pathways shapes the trajectory of phenotypic evolution on a phylogenetic ...

At the University of Stirling in Scotland, Dr Mario Vallejo-Marin, an Evolutionary Plant Biologist found a new species of flower in 2012 in South Lanarkshire. And if that wasn't enough, two years ...

Recent advances in molecular phylogenetics and a series of important palaeobotanical discoveries have revolutionized our understanding of angiosperm diversification. Yet, the origin and early ...

We now know what the ancestor of today’s flowers looked like, thanks to scientists who used computer models to re-create the plant that lived 140 million years ago. Before now, we didn’t understand ...

Recent phylogenetic reconstructions suggest that axially condensed flower-like structures evolved iteratively in seed plants from either simple or compound strobili. The simple-strobilus model of ...

Flower generalization has often been viewed as a suboptimal solution to managing the needs of different visitors. Researchers have developed a framework to examine flower-animal interactions and how ...

Evolutionary biologists have long sought to explain the distribution of traits across the tree of life and, in particular, why some traits are common while others remain rare. The number of taxa with ...