It proved that there are really two stages in a fern’s life cycle. What you see as the green plant is actually the second phase, a stage in which the spore is sterile and bears no sex organs.

Each of the spores is a single-celled organism, and when spores released from ferns drop to the ground, or are dispersed far away by the wind, they go through a two-stage life cycle before ...

Dinosaurs, such as the towering Diplodocus, would have grazed on ancient ferns at their feet. Ferns evolved a fascinating life cycle that involves growing two separate, very different life forms, one ...

All ferns have a life-cycle very unlike those of the trees and wildflowers around them, for they retain a more ancient mode of reproduction and never produce flowers, pollen, seeds or fruit. Instead, ...

On a beautiful Saturday morning in early June, I volunteered at Wilson’s Farm in Brighton Township for an environmental field ...

Ferns, on the other hand ... But due to their relative rarity, the life cycle of independent gametophytes remains poorly understood. Inspired by promising preliminary work, a team of researchers ...

This is how the diversity of life on Earth came to be ... To the contrary, we found that in many types of ferns – one of the oldest groups of plants on Earth – evolution of reproductive ...