Biodiversity today has the unusual property that 85% of plant and animal species live on
land rather than in the sea, and half of these live in tropical rainforests. An explosive boost to …

The integration of fossils, phylogeny, and geochronology has resulted in an increasingly
well-resolved timetable of evolution. Life appears to have taken root before the earliest …

Inferring the intrinsic and extrinsic drivers of species diversification and phenotypic disparity
across the tree of life is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. In green plants, polyploidy …

Fundamental differences in the distribution of oceans and landmasses in the Northern and
Southern Hemispheres potentially impact patterns of biological diversity in the two areas …

Premise of the Study Conifers are an important living seed plant lineage with an extensive
fossil record spanning more than 300 million years. The group therefore provides an …

Most extant genus-level radiations in gymnosperms are of Oligocene age or younger,
reflecting widespread extinction during climate cooling at the Oligocene/Miocene boundary …

Phylogenetic reconstruction is fundamental to study evolutionary biology and historical
biogeography. However, there was not a molecular phylogeny of gymnosperms represented …

Angiosperm radiation in the Cretaceous is thought to have profoundly diminished the
success of the conifers, the other major woody plant group present at the time. However …

The hormone abscisic acid (ABA) plays a critical role in enhancing plant survival during
water deficit. Recent molecular evidence suggests that ABA is synthesized in the phloem …

Australia has a mostly dry, open, fire-shaped landscape of sclerophyllous and xeromorphic
flora dominated by eucalypt and acacia trees, with diverse shrubs from a few families such …