Studies have revealed that flowering plants may have originated in the Jurassic period or even earlier

KUNMING, Jan. 29 (Xinhua) -- A study conducted by a team of evolutionary biologists from Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and China suggests that flowering plants may have originated in the Jurassic period or even earlier, millions of years earlier than the recognized oldest fossil record, the website of china's
Xishuangbana Tropical Botanical Garden announced Thursday.
flowering plants are now the most abundant and diverse plant groups in terrestrial ecosystems, containing almost all the crops that humans now eat. The fossil record suggests that its diversity may have been established between 80 million and 100 million years ago, but early flowering plants were still scarce and small. The origin of flowering plants has always been a mystery.
a team of evolutionary biologists from Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and China conducted a simulation analysis based on a large-scale plant fossil database established by the Xing Yaowu Research Team at the
Xishuangdana Tropical Botanical Garden in China. The results suggest that flowering plants may have originated in the Jurassic period or even earlier, millions of years earlier than the oldest known fossil record. Early flowering plants are difficult to detect due to factors such as rarity and low petrochemical probability.
, the study also found that flowering plants may have existed for 100 million years before they dominated.
" early flowering plants are likely to have long lived in ancient terrestrial ecosystems dominated by ferns and naked plants. It reminds me that modern mammals were also shadowed by dinosaur-era reptiles before they became protagonists. Daniele Silvestro, a researcher from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, said.
"We don't expect this study to end the debate about the origins of flowering plants, but it does provide a powerful impetus for some people who are still searching for Jurassic flowering plants," said Xing Yaowu, a researcher at the Xishuangdana Tropical Botanical Garden in
, China. Jurassic flowering plants are not the fictional product of molecular system developmental analysis, but our future worthy of discovery. The
research was published in Nature-Ecology and Evolution under the title "Fossil data support a pre-Cretaceous origin of flowering plants".