Fungi shifted plant balance of power

Cooperating with fungi didn't just help the earliest plants spread across a barren, rocky landscape; it also played a decisive role in the rise of more complex plants with roots and leaves that make up most of today's flora.

When plants go polyploid

(PhysOrg.com) -- Plant lineages with multiple copies of their genetic information face higher extinction rates than their relatives, researchers report in Science magazine.

Bat researchers no longer flying blind on echolocation

Researchers at The University of Western Ontario led an international and multi-disciplinary study that sheds new light on the way that bats echolocate. With echolocation, animals emit sounds and then listen to the reflected ...

Can modern-day plants trace their New Zealand ancestry?

One hundred million years ago the earth looked very different from how it does today. Continents were joining and breaking apart, dinosaurs were roaming the earth, and flowering plants were becoming more widespread.

The bizarre lives of bone-eating worms

The females of the recently discovered Osedax marine worms feast on submerged bones via a complex relationship with symbiotic bacteria, and they are turning out to be far more diverse and widespread than scientists expected. ...

New species of ghostshark from California and Baja California

New species are not just discovered in exotic locales -- even places as urban as California still yield discoveries of new plants and animals. Academy scientists recently named a new species of chimaera, an ancient and bizarre ...

Extinction runs in the family

(PhysOrg.com) -- Global calamities like the one that doomed most dinosaurs forever alter the varieties of life found on Earth, but new research shows that it doesn't take a catastrophe to end entire lineages. An analysis ...

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