164 Million-Year-Old Fossil Changes Everything We Know About Evolution of Plants

According to the scientists, the revelation alters our understanding of the development of angiosperms. Scientists have found the oldest form of a flowering plant in a 164 million-year-old botanical specimen in China.

The Discovery of 164 Million-Year Old Plant Fossil in China

The finding places the origin of angiosperms solidly in the Jurassic era, approximately 145 million to 201 million years old.

The specimen, in which is given the title of Florigerminis jurassica by the expert to the distinct variety, is 1.7 inches in length and 0.8 inches (2 cm) broad and was discovered in China's Hunan Province area.

It has a stalk, a leafy twig, a spherical berry, and a small flower bud measuring about 3 square millimeters.

Plants are classified into two varieties where are the flowering plants or the angiosperms and other one is the gymnosperms or non-flowering plants.

All the flower petal and the fruits in the specimen are significant indications that F. Jurassica was a flowering plant, not really a gymnosperm, the main botanical kind throughout the Jurassic epoch.

the newfound specimen provides the strongest persuasive indication yet that flowering plants somewhat appear during the epoch as historical data suggests that flowering plants did not appear until around the Cretaceous era, somewhere around 66 million to 145 million years ago.

A scientist at the Chinese Institute of Sciences' Nanjing Department of Geology and Paleontology (NIGPAS), and lead writer Xin Wang explained in a message that, "Several paleobotanists are astonished by the specimen, as it is extremely unique from what is mentioned in literature."

Newly Found Plant Fossil Shows Indication of The Evolution of Flowering Plants

The newly found specimen may not be the earliest specimen of a petrified inflorescence yet known.

Experts identified 174 million-year-old blossoms from a shrub of the plant family Nanjinganthus, which is also present in China, in a paper released in eLife in 2018.

Nevertheless, other experts have doubted if Nanjinganthus is genuinely a flowering plant since the blooms were not developed sufficiently to separate themselves from gymnosperm leafy formations.

According to wang flowers are also incredibly fragile and difficult to decompose naturally, making it difficult to distinguish them from those other plant matter.

However, the flowering bud and fruit in the discovered specimen establish unequivocally that F. Jurassica was unmistakably a flowering plant, he declared.

As to the investigators, the specimen serves to highlight the prevalence of flowering plant in the Jurassic and urges a reassessment of flowering plant evolution.

Though there is no method that determines with the absence of achielogical remains, Wang argues that numerous additional recognized Jurassic botanical taxa, such as Schmeissneria, Yuhania, Jurafructus, Nanjinganthus, Xingxueanthus, and Juraherba, might also be members of the genus.

Experts had previously concluded that those taxa were gymnosperms since they evolved during the Jurassic period.

Nonetheless, if fruiting bodies existed throughout the Jurassic, they would also have been extremely rare opposed to gymnosperms and sparsely populated, making discovering comparable well-preserved specimens of certain flower buds extremely difficult.

It is also conceivable that F. Jurassica is perhaps one of the original and earliest developmental linkages among ancient angiosperm-like species, including certain Nanjinganthus, and more modern real fruiting bodies discovered in the Cretaceous epoch.