The fossil database hides new clues about the origin of flowering plants

archaefructus liaoningensis, one of the earliest quilt plants ever discovered (early Cretaceous, 125 million years ago).
Bonner Botanical Garden)
Flowing plants" have almost reshaped the ecosystem pattern of the world's continental plates, but in the study of evolutionary biology, the exact origin of this plant group has been an open question. Many systematic developmental analyses based on modern plants have caused widespread controversy by suggesting that flowering plants originated much earlier than the existing fossil record.
new study by evolutionary biologists from Switzerland, Sweden, the UK and China suggests that flowering plants may have originated in the Jurassic or even earlier, millions of years before the oldest known fossil record. The results were published On January 28th in Nature - Ecology and Evolution.
" Palaeontologists and molecular biologists have long debated the origin of sub-plants, which estimate the origin of the plant based on the age of the oldest fossils, and molecular biologists, who use fossil information to calibrate the systematic evolution history of long-scale plants. But Philip Donoghue, a professor at the University of Bristol in the UK, said: "These ideas still oversimplify the problem, and the fossil record itself may contain much more information than we have seen and needs to be re-excavated and interpreted." The
based on a large database of plant fossils established by the Xing Yaowu team at the Xishuangdana Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Currently, the database contains more than 15,000 large fossil records, almost including the major flowering plant representative groups.
, combing the fossil record alone does not accurately estimate the origin time of a group. Dr Christine Bacon, of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, said the team tried to develop new mathematical models and use computer simulations to answer the question more effectively.
Previously, paleontology recognized that the earliest fossil record of flowering plants was in the early Cretaceous, but this study suggests that flowering plants may have originated in the Jurassic period or even earlier, although early flowering plants were difficult to detect due to factors such as rarity and low petrochemical probability. This conclusion is not the product of overestimation of molecular system development in the past, but can be supported by paleontical data.
"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 relentlessly searching for Jurassic flowering plants."
Yaowu, a researcher at the Shuangbona Tropical Botanical Garden in Western China, said jurassic flowering plants are not the product of molecular system developmental analysis, but rather a discovery that deserves more anticipation in the future.
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