Family Tree for Orchids Explains Their Astonishing Variability
Thursday, September 3, 2015 - 12:30
in Paleontology & Archaeology
Orchids, a fantastically complicated and diverse group of flowering plants, have long blended the exotic with the beautiful. Previously, botanists have proposed more than a half dozen explanations for this diversity. Now, research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published last week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, corroborates many of these explanations, but finds no evidence for other logical suggestions, such as that deceitful pollination.