North America Hit Hard By Asteroid Strike In Yucatan 65 Million Years Ago
...ere extinctions of plants. After the devastation, ferns dominated the flora of central North America.Ferns...ve indicators ofenvironmental devastation. Because ferns reproduce through the use of hardyspores, the plants are regarded as key flora in colonizing the sit...Scientists Discover Smallest Frog
...og living under leaf litter and among the roots of ferns in a humid rainforest on the western slope of Cuba's Monte Iberia. Hedges and Cuban scientist Alberto Estrada gave the frog the scientific name Eleutherodactylus iberia . Those two words are more than three times longer than the frog itself. ...10,000-Year-Old Clues Suggest Future Forest Changes
...t had more abundant Douglas fir, alder and bracken ferns than today. "All three species growafter a severe disturbance such as fire. We have found a large amount of charcoal in the lake bottoms dating to that period (7,000-9,000 years ago) indicating forest fires," Mathewes explains. He attributes the fire......ely small in stature, but a new studysuggests that ferns can play an important role in determining the futu...nfern-free areas. They discovered that hayscented ferns (Dennstaedtiapunctilobula) and interrupted ferns (Osmunda claytonia) affected the growth andsurvival...Scientists shake up "family tree" of green plants
... Nature's cover story on February 1 concludes that ferns and horsetails are not -- as currently believed --...ades between mosses and flowering plants. In fact, ferns and horsetails, together, are the closest living relatives to seed plants. "Today's systematist......eley Herbarium, provided very strong evidence that ferns and horsetails are one another's closest relatives... withstand drought. If the trait, common in algae, ferns and lichens, can be transferred to crop plants, they might subsist on less water or better survive d...Disturbance can benefit some rare forest plants
... fewer endemic plants and was dominated by bracken ferns and other opportunistic pioneers that colonize cleared areas. Why would moderate human disturbance be good for endemic plants? Endemics are more vulnerable to invasion by non-native species and apparently do not compete as well as widespread species...... plants make complex, divided leaves like those of ferns or tomatoes instead of simple, single leaves such ...he earliest types of vascular land plants, such as ferns and cycads, are complex, Sinha said. The first flowering plants, or angiosperms, are thought to have...Non-native earthworms may be wiping out rare plants
...Found only in the upper Great Lakes region, goblin ferns live between the forest floor and the underlying mineral soil. Because these tiny ferns only send up leaves briefly during the summer (and often don't emerge at all), they are thought to g...Dinosaur, crab fossils reveal ecosystem secrets
...a predator-rich mangrove setting dominated by tree ferns and other coastal plants, similar to Florida's swampy Everglades. The rocks containing these fossils are about 94 million years old, which means they date back to the Cretaceous Period, which lasted from 130-65 million years. "The two normally don'...Virginia Tech-led group receives third five-year international biodiversity grant
... Zahamena National Park and created a guide to the ferns and is creating a guide to the woody plants. "This will attract a certain kind of tourists, providing an economic basis for preserving the park and it's biodiversity," says Kingston. The other partners in the group met with villagers near the collect......a, which re-established relatively quickly, ground ferns at first, followed after decades to hundreds of years by more diverse, woody vegetation. A similar layer of fungi and algae is known from a previous catastrophe which happened 251 million years ago at the Permian-Triassic boundary. This was an even g...Arlington, Va.--Belying the popular notion of ferns as delicate, lacy relics surmounted by the evoluti...r angiosperms, evolved some 144 million years ago, ferns took advantage of ecological niches in the new angiosperm forests to diversify into a far richer arr...