By analyzing more than 1,000 fossil remains, scientists have discovered that an unassuming, 130-million-year-old water-dwelling plant could be one of Earth’s first flowering plants.
Montsechia vidalii, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could change many theories about how angiosperms, or plants with the ability to produce flowers, first came to be.
“Because it is so ancient and is totally aquatic,” the study authors wrote, this extinct freshwater plant “raises questions centered on the very early evolutionary history of flowering plants.”
Flowers are a relatively recent addition to the plant family tree; until they emerged, plants managed to reproduce without growing many-petaled lures for nectar-seeking insects.
It may seem like a complicated system – lure a bug in with flashy or fragrant flowers, get some pollen on their bodies, and hope those bugs go find another plant of the same species. But it seems to have been a highly successful evolutionary move, because soon after flowering plants are believed to have arrived on the scene, they really bloomed.
“The world of 120 million years ago was one of dynamic biological processes. During that time the flowering plants emerged as the dominant global floristic element, a transformative event that ultimately altered the character of the entire planet,” Donald Les of the University of Connecticut, who was not involved in the paper, wrote in a commentary. “Understandably, the rapid rise of angiosperms has intrigued paleoecologists and evolutionary biologists, who have strived to elucidate underlying explanations for their successful radiation.”
Scientists want to understand why flowering plants were so successful, but it’s hard to answer that question when you don’t know what the earliest species looked like, and how they changed over time.
Scientists can’t even say for sure whether flowering plants first developed on water or on land.
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