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What flowers looked like 100 million years ago

02.08.2017

Flowering plants with at least 300,000 species are by far the most diverse group of plants on Earth.

They include almost all the species used by people for food, medicine, and many other purposes. However, flowering plants arose only about 140 million years ago, quite late in the evolution of plants, toward the end of the age of the dinosaurs, but since then have diversified spectacularly. No one knows exactly how this happened, and the origin and early evolution of flowering plants and especially their flowers still remains one of the biggest enigmas in biology, almost 140 years after Charles Darwin called their rapid rise in the Cretaceous "an abominable mystery". A new study, coordinated by Juerg Schoenenberger from the University of Vienna and Hervé Sauquet of the Université Paris-Sud and published in "Nature Communications" reconstructs the evolution of flowers and sheds new light on what the earliest flowers might have looked like. [read more]