Plants -- even relatively small ones -- played a crucial role in establishing a beachhead for life on land, according to recent work by an international team of researchers. The group found that early ...

Plant fossils from 400m years ago show how soils became stabilised, a key moment in the evolution of life The “present is the key to the past” is our mantra for all sorts of geological interpretation.

It was one of the first examples of geoengineering: when plants began to colonise the land they stabilised sediments, generated soils and greened the planet. Now we have a window on the process, ...

A study of rooted fossil soils in China’s Yunnan region, published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences on August 8, has established the time of colonisation of land regions by the earliest ...