ARGUABLY the world’s weirdest plant, Welwitschia mirabilis is a tangled mass of shredded, fraying leaves in the Namib desert. For a thousand years, perhaps more, it grows just two long leaves, which ...
Flowering plants, or angiosperms, now dominate Earth’s flora, but biologists thought they truly took off only after an asteroid impact 66 million years ago. A ‘botanical Pompeii’ containing fossilized ...