Evolution: sudden flowering plant appearance (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, January 28, 2021, 20:01 (1183 days ago) @ David Turell

It bothered Darwin and the issue may now be solved:

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-unravels-darwin-abominable-mystery.html

"The origin of flowering plants famously puzzled Charles Darwin, who described their sudden appearance in the fossil record from relatively recent geological times as an "abominable mystery". This mystery has further deepened with an inexplicable discrepancy between the relatively recent fossil record and a much older time of origin of flowering plants estimated using genome data.

"Now a team of scientists from Switzerland, Sweden, the UK, and China may have solved the puzzle. Their results show flowering plants indeed originated in the Jurassic or earlier, that is millions of years earlier than their oldest undisputed fossil evidence, according to a new study published in the scientific journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The lack of older fossils, according to their results, might instead be the product of low probability of fossilization and the rarity of early flowering plants.

"'A diverse group of flowering plants had been living for a very long time shadowed by ferns and gymnosperms, which were dominating ancient ecosystems. This reminds me of how modern mammals lived for a long time laying low in the age of dinosaurs, before becoming a dominant component of modern faunas," said lead author Dr. Daniele Silvestro, from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.

"Flowering plants are by far the most abundant and diverse group of plants globally in modern ecosystems, far outnumbering ferns and gymnosperms, and including almost all crops sustaining human livelihood. The fossil record shows this pattern was established over the past 80-100 million years, while earlier flowering plants are thought to have been small and rare. The new results show that flowering plants have been around for as many as 100 million years before they finally came to dominance.

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"The new study, which was based exclusively on fossils and did not include genome data or evolutionary trees, shows an earlier age of flowering plants is not an artifact of phylogenetic analyses, but is in fact supported by palaeontological data as well."

Comment: We still don't know if the flowering plants appeared suddenly even if longer ago.