Angiosperm paleobotany has widened its horizons, incorporated new techniques, developed new databases, and accepted new questions that can now focus on the evolution of the group. The fossil record of early flowering plants is now playing an active role in addressing questions of angiosperm phylogeny, angiosperm origins, and angiosperm radiations. Three basic nodes of angiosperm radiations are ...

Nucleotide-binding site-leucine-rich repeat (NBS-LRR) genes make up the largest plant disease resistance gene family (R genes), with hundreds of copies occurring in individual angiosperm genomes. However, the expansion history of NBS-LRR genes during angiosperm evolution is largely unknown. By identifying more than 6,000 NBS-LRR genes in 22 representative angiosperms and reconstructing their ph...

Growing evidence of morphological diversity in angiosperm flowers, seeds and pollen from the mid Cretaceous and the presence of derived lineages from increasingly older geological deposits both imply that the timing of early angiosperm cladogenesis is older than fossil-based estimates have indicated. An alternative to fossils for calibrating the phylogeny comes from divergence in DNA sequence d...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The mid-Cretaceous is a period of sudden turnover from gymnosperm to angiosperm-dominated floras. The aim was to investigate the fossil plant ecology in order to follow the spread of angiosperm taxa. METHODS Floristic lists and localities from the latest Albian-Cenomanian of Europe are analysed with Wagner's Parsimony Method, a clustering method currently used in phylogeny...

Through the lens of the fossil record, angiosperm diversification precipitated a Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution (KTR) in which pollinators, herbivores and predators underwent explosive co-diversification. Molecular dating studies imply that early angiosperm evolution is not documented in the fossil record. This mismatch remains controversial. We used a Bayesian molecular dating method to ana...

The stomata of conifers display very little short-term response to changes in atmospheric CO(2) concentration (C(a)), whereas the stomatal responses of angiosperms to C(a) increase in response to water stress. This behaviour of angiosperm stomata appears to be dependent on foliar levels of abscisic acid (ABA(f)). Here two alternative explanations for the stomatal insensitivity of conifers to C(...

Early angiosperm evolution, beginning approximately 140 million years ago, saw many innovations that enabled flowering plants to alter ecosystems globally. These included the development of novel, flower-based pollinator attraction mechanisms and the development of increased water transport capacity in stems and leaves. Vein length per area (VLA) of leaves increased nearly threefold in the firs...

In the Rosaceae, Scrophulariaceae, and Solanaceae, the stylar product of the self-incompatibility (S-) locus is an RNase. Using protein sequence data from 34 RNase genes (three fungal RNases, seven angiosperm non-S RNases, 11 Rosaceae S-alleles, three Scrophulariaceae S-alleles, and ten Solanaceae S-alleles) we reconstructed the genealogy of angiosperm RNases using the neighbor joining method a...