#flowering plants

From the beloved vanilla orchid, whose pods flavor many of our favorite desserts, to the nose-twisting corpse flower, whose gigantic flower draws crowds with every fetid bloom, even the world's most treasured flowering plants are in grave danger.

Fossils from the Jose Creek Formation in New Mexico reveal that angiosperms (flowering plants) had built dense, fruit-bearing forests nearly 75 million years ago -- nearly 9 million years before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction that killed the dino