The discovery of an 80-million-year-old fossil plant shifts the known origins of lamiids to the Cretaceous period, extending the record of nearly 40,000 species of flowering plants, including modern-day staple crops such as coffee, tomatoes, potatoes, and mint.

A Fossil Fruit From California Shows Ancestors Of Modern-Day Crops

(Photo : FRANCOIS NASCIMBENI/AFP via Getty Images)

Brian Atkinson, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas and paleobotany curator at the KU Biodiversity Institute, recently published a study of the fossil plant Palaeophytocrene chicoensis in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Plants.

According to Atkinson, such a fossil indicated that a diverse group of flowering plants evolved before our original understanding.

The fossil is part of a liana group, which are woody vines that add structural complexity to rainforests, as per ScienceDaily.

It demonstrated that this group of flowering plants appeared extremely early in the fossil record.

There had been some speculation that they existed during the Cretaceous period, but no solid evidence.

This is an excellent indication that structurally complex, modern-type rainforests existed as early as 80 million years ago.

It's a time when forests are shifting from being dominated by gymnosperms like conifers to being dominated by flowering plants, according to Atkinson.

People know these ecological turnarounds happened during the Late Cretaceous, but we still need critical evidence, such as how certain ecosystems, such as rainforests, formed, which now contain more than half of all plant species alive today.

This fossil demonstrated that the lamiids, a diverse group of plants, were older than previously thought, and Cretaceous ecosystems on North America's west coast may have resembled structurally complex rainforests.

The well-preserved fossil was discovered by construction crews working near Granite Bay in Sacramento, California, in the 1990s.

The fossil was discovered in deposits of the Chico Formation linked to the Campanian (the fifth of six ages of the Late Cretaceous epoch) and is housed at Sierra College's natural history museum.

The name of the fossil fruit is unimportant, but its significance is not.

The findings, according to the KU researcher, helped establish that one of the most diverse flowering plant groups survived the dinosaur extinction event to evolve into thousands of familiar modern species, including vital food crops for humanity.

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Plans during the cretaceous period

Early Cretaceous land plants were similar to Jurassic land plants. Cycads, ginkgoes, conifers, and ferns were among them, as per Britannica.

Flowering plants (angiosperms) first appeared in the Early Cretaceous, became common by the beginning of the Middle Cretaceous, and came to dominate the landscape by the mid-to-late Cretaceous.

Montsechia vidalii, an aquatic plant that lived 130 million to 125 million years ago, is the oldest known fossil angiosperm.

Figs, magnolias, poplars, willows, sycamores, and herbaceous plants were among the angiosperms.

Insects evolved alongside the introduction of many new plant species.

The Cretaceous record of lamiids has been difficult to establish, but I knew these fossils had to exist somewhere.

In comparison to the Western Interior and East Coast of North America, the West Coast of North America is under-sampled for Cretaceous plants.

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