Tuesday, February 23, 2021

First Flowering Plants

From Sci News:

Flowering plants (angiosperms) are the most diverse of all land plants, becoming abundant in the Cretaceous period (145 to 66 million years ago) and achieving dominance in the Cenozoic (66 million years ago-present). However, the exact timing of their origin remains a controversial topic. To resolve this discrepancy, a team of paleontologists from Europe and China estimated the ages of angiosperm families on the basis of the fossil record and their living diversity. Their results, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, support Charles Darwin’s hypothesis of a rapid Cretaceous diversification of angiosperms and indicate that several families originated in the Jurassic, strongly rejecting a Cretaceous origin for the group. (Read more.)

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