World's oldest fossil flowering plant discovered in China
Miscellaneous / / January 24, 2022
This find could rewrite the history of flower evolution.
The oldest known flower bud fossil has been discovered by researchers in China. “It is very different from what we know about ancient flowers from books,” said Live Science Xin Wang of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology.
The flower, named Florigerminis jurassica by researchers, belongs to the angiosperm phylum, that is, to a flowering plant. Their origin is the subject of some debate in paleobiology, as such flowers are usually too fragile to survive in the fossil record for millions of years. The evidence for their evolution is too sketchy.
They were previously thought to have existed as far back as the Cretaceous between 66 and 145 million years ago, but there are a few fossils discovered over the past few decades that hint at a much earlier origin.
One of these fossils is the ancient flower Nanjinganthus dendrostyla, whose discovery was announced back in 2018. He is even older than F. jurassica, but its status as a true flowering plant has proven controversial. Some researchers believe that N. dendrostyla is not complex enough to be considered an angiosperm, while others argue that it is too complex to be a non-flowering plant.
F. jurassica, on the other hand, includes not only a leaf branch, but also physically connected fruits and flower buds, Xin Wang explained. This removes all ambiguity: if one plant can have a bud and a mature fruit, then this implies the existence of flowers at an intermediate stage.
The researchers believe that their discovery of F. jurassica will cause a rethinking of the origin of flowering plants and push the evolution of flowers back into history by at least a couple of tens of millions of years.
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