Specialised sexual parts have led to co-evolution in fertilization and seed dispersal. The stamens, and the male and female gametophytes, have been adapted in many ways to suit particular pollinators. The smaller pollen grain shortens the time between pollination and fertilization, which can be up to a year in gymnosperms. The small female gametophyte also allows rapid seed production, which led to annual herbaceous life-cycles.
Adaptations in these novelties allowed angiosperms to invade many habitats. They now dominate everywhere except the boreal forest or taiga, which is still composed almost entirely of gymnosperms.
A whole genome duplication (doubling) at 160 million years ago (mya) may have started the ancestral line that led to all modern flowering plants. That event was studied by sequencing the genome of an ancient flowering plant, "Amborella trichopoda". "Amborella", found on the Pacific island of New Caledonia, belongs to a sister group of the other flowering plants. Studies suggest that it has features that may have been characteristic of the earliest flowering plants.
The earliest known fossil confidently identified as an angiosperm, "Archaefructus liaoningensis", is dated to about 125 mya in the Lower Cretaceous. Pollen probably of angiosperm origin takes the fossil record back to about 130 mya.
The phylogeny of Angiosperms is as follows:
Amanda Michalka
Amanda Joy "AJ" Michalka (born April 10, 1991) is an American singer and actress from Torrance, California. Her parents are Carrey Begley-Michalka and Mark Michalka. Her older sister is actress Alyson Michalka. She and her sister are in the band 78violet. She starred with her sister in the Disney movie "Cow Belles". She is of German-American ancestry.
Amanda Michalka was born in Torrance, California in 1991. Her older sister, Alyson "Aly" Michalka and their parents moved to Seattle, Washington. There her parents made sure they were exposed to all varieties of music. They then moved back to Southern California, where they still live.
Michalka was in a number of WORD Music Productions at her church in Southern California as a young child. Michalka plays a variety of instruments such as acoustic guitar, electric guitar, piano, and bongos. She used to be a model for catalogs. In March 2006, she made her first appearance on the Disney Channel in the Disney Channel Original Movie "Cow Belles", as "Courtney Callum", along with sister Aly, as "Taylor Callum". She has also made appearances on shows such as "Oliver Beene", "Six Feet Under", "The Guardian", and "General Hospital". She also appeared with her sister in the MTV movie, "".
Salmonberry
A salmonberry ("Rubus spectabilis") is a type of fruit. It is a bramble in the rose family Rosaceae. It is native and widespread in areas of Alaska, predominantly the southeast. It is also widespread in Washington State. They come in red and orange varieties. They fruit in early summer and are used by many to make jams, juices, and other such products. They are considered to be a weed and reproduce and spread rapidly. The berries can be eaten raw, straight from the source. They co-exist with huckleberries, blueberries, thimbleberries, and other such plants in the Tongass National Forest. This fruit is related to the rose and are native to the west coast of North America from Alaska to Idaho.
Grape tomato
A grape tomato is a small, usually oblong tomato. They are similar in size to a small cherry tomato and they both have a similar taste, but the grape tomato also has the similar oblong shape of a plum tomato. The tomatoes were introduced to the United States market in 1997 by grower Andrew Chu, who got them from Taiwan's Known-You Seed Co, though the majority of the production is by a company called Procacci Brothers, who market them as "Santa Sweets". They are considered a difficult crop to grow, as they do not produce as heavily as many cherry tomato varieties.
It is believed that the tomatoes originated in Southeast Asia. They are eaten as bar snacks in some parts of Thailand.
Adolf von Henselt
Adolf von Henselt (born Schwabach, Bavaria, May 9 1814; died Warmbrunn (now Cieplice), Silesia, October 10 1889) was a German pianist and composer. He had piano lessons from Hummel in Weimar. When he was a young man he played in concerts all over Germany. Then he went to Russia where he was very successful and he settled there to live. He became pianist at the court of the tsar and taught the tsar’s children how to play the piano.
Henselt was known for his beautiful playing of the music of Chopin. He was very good at playing widely spaced arpeggios and could make them sound very smooth (legato) even if he was not using the pedal.
As a composer he is mostly remembered today for a few of his short works which are often quite sentimental, e.g. "Frühlingslied" ("Spring Song") and "Si oiseau j’étais" ("If I were a bird").
Cherry tomato
The cherry tomato is a type of tomato that is a fruit. This type of tomato was originally developed in Israel.
Binary star
A binary star is two stars which orbit around each other. For each star, the other is its "companion star". Many stars are part of a system with two or more stars. The brighter star is called the primary star, and the other is the secondary.
Binary stars are important in astrophysics because looking at their orbits allows scientists to find out their masses. From this is got the mass–luminosity relationship, and from this is got the masses of individual stars.
Binary stars are not the same as line-of-sight "optical double stars", which look close together but are not connected by gravity. Optical double stars may actually be far apart in space, but binary stars are quite close together. The first person to discover and prove true binary stars was the Anglo-German astronomer William Herschel. He published the first catalogue of binary stars, and his son John Herschel found several thousand more and updated the catalogue. John Michell first suggested that double stars might be physically attached to each other when he argued in 1767 that the probability that a double star was due to a chance alignment was small. William Herschel began observing double stars in 1779 and soon after that he published catalogs of about 700 double stars.
By the modern definition, the term "binary star" is generally restricted to pairs of stars which revolve around a common centre of mass. Binary stars which can be resolved with a telescope or interferometric methods are known as "visual binaries". For most of the known visual binary stars one whole revolution (complete circle) has not been observed yet, they are seen to have travelled along a curved path or a partial arc.
Some stars appear to be in orbit around empty space, and appear not to have a companion. In this case, the companion star is either very small and faint, or it is a neutron star or a black hole. The best-known example of a star with an invisible companion is Cygnus X-1, in which the visible star's companion appears to be a black hole.
The more general term double star is used for pairs of stars which are seen to be close together in the sky. This distinction is rarely made in languages other than English. Double stars may be binary systems or may be merely two stars that appear to be close together in the sky but have vastly different true distances from the Sun. The latter are termed "optical doubles" or "optical pairs".
A "visual binary" star is one for which the separation of the two stars can be seen with a telescope. The brighter star is the "primary" and the fainter star is the "secondary". Visual binaries take a long time to orbit one another, in the area of hundreds or even thousands of years.