New Study Unravels Darwin's 'Abominable Mystery' Surrounding Origin of Flowering Plants
Published:06 Feb.2021 Source:University of Bristol
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.