Abstract: The discipline plant evolutionary developmental biology has emerged over the last 10 years. It is a major clade of evolutionary developmental biology or evo-devo. Evo-devo has been established step by step, with integration of evolutionary biology and embryology, genetics and developmental biology. The discipline has its origin in comparative embryology founded by von Baer in the early nineteenth century. Following a quiescent period of almost one century, evo-devo erupted out of the discovery of the homeobox genes in the early 1980s and the proposal of the floral ABC model in the early 1990s, in addition to the flourishing research on developmental genes. Evo-devo has become one of the hot topics in life sciences in the twenty-first century. In this article, we review the history of evo-devo, and then focus on the progress of plant evolutionary developmental biology in the last 10 years. We mainly introduce studies on the MADS-box genes that play a key role in revealing plant development in the major clades of plants. Moreover, we discuss the implications of such important evolutionary issues as perianth origin, flower symmetry, and leaf evolution.