Spring arrives, and with it, the magnolias. Their enormous pink and white blooms unfurl in many parts of the world, but if ...

Cycads are ancient palm-like plants that appeared 275m years ago, long before flowering plants evolved ...

Rhopalotria furfuracea beetles pollinate the cones of cycad plants. Researchers now know that the cones attract pollinators by heating themselves up, which emits infrared light that the insects have ...

Long before flowers dazzled pollinators with brilliant colors and sweet scents, ancient plants used another feature to signal insects: heat. The findings, based on an analysis of the biology and ...

Harvard researchers have discovered that cycads—one of the oldest living lineages of seed plants—heat up their reproductive organs to attract beetle pollinators and the insects possess infrared ...

Flowers are often described as visual advertisements, using bright colors and strong scents to draw in insects. Yet long before petals and pigments dominated the landscape, some plants relied on a ...

Researchers have discovered the first species pollinated by sap beetles in the genus Pandanus, a group of palm-like plants native to the tropics and subtropics of Africa and Eurasia. The discovery ...

Some of the earliest plants attracted pollinators by producing heat that made these plants glow with infrared light, according to a new set of experiments. The work, published in the journal Science, ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The words “pollination” and “flower” may seem inseparable, but plants began courting insects millions of years before they evolved ...

Bees and butterflies are praised for their pollination prowess. But millions of years before they ever flirted with a flower, beetles were one of the world’s pre-eminent pollinators. Among the ...