The history of the first plant on Earth is not as simple as the identification of a particular species of plants, but it is a ...

Early one morning in 1985, a pair of researchers trekked into a spit of Colombian rainforest surrounded by coffee plantations. Their task was to identify all the epiphytes — plants that grow on other ...

The first plants came from algae around 470 million years ago, slowly spreading on land and helping create oxygen and soil for life to grow. They reproduced using spores and formed partnerships with ...

With vascular tissue, plant life really started to flourish. By about 360 million years ago, vast forests covered much of Earth. Giant ferns and treelike plants, some over 100 feet (30 meters) tall, ...

UC College of Arts and Sciences Professor Thomas Algeo has been studying the planet's five major mass extinctions since the Ordovician Period, when global sea levels were much higher than today. In a ...

Some of the earliest plants attracted pollinators by producing heat that made these plants glow with infrared light, according to a new set of experiments. The work, published in the journal Science, ...