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Post Info TOPIC: Amborella trichopodais


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First flowering plant
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Ancient underwater plant 'could be world's first flower'

Botanists in the US say an ancient plant that grew underwater in what is modern day Europe may have been the world's first known flowering plant.
Researchers studied more than 1,000 fossils of the Montsechia Vidalii species as part of the study.
The plant resembled a pond-weed but bore fruit containing a single seed - the defining characteristic of a flowering plant.

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Flowers
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World's earliest flower may date back 162 mln years: study

The world's first typical flower may date back to 162 million years ago, more than 37 million years earlier than previously thought, Chinese researchers reported in a new study.
The fossil flower, named Euanthus panii, was found in western Liaoning Province, according to the study, which was published in the recent edition of the UK-based Historical Biology, an international journal of paleobiology.

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Flowering plants
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Amber fossil reveals ancient reproduction in flowering plants

A 100-million-year old piece of amber has been discovered which reveals the oldest evidence of sexual reproduction in a flowering plant - a cluster of 18 tiny flowers from the Cretaceous Period - with one of them in the process of making some new seeds for the next generation.
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RE: Amborella trichopodais
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New fossils push the origin of flowering plants back by 100 million years to the early Triassic

Drilling cores from Switzerland have revealed the oldest known fossils of direct ancestors of flowering plants. These beautifully preserved 240-million-year-old pollen grains are evidence that flowering plants evolved 100 million years earlier than previously thought, according to Rsearchers from the University of Zurich.
Flowering plants evolved from extinct plants related to conifers, ginkgos, cycads, and seed ferns. The oldest known fossils from flowering plants are pollen grains. These are small, robust and numerous and therefore fossilize more easily than leaves and flowers. An uninterrupted sequence of fossilized pollen from flowers begins in the Early Cretaceous, approximately 140 million years ago, and it is generally assumed that flowering plants first evolved around that time. But the present study documents flowering plant-like pollen that is 100 million years older, implying that flowering plants may have originated in the Early Triassic (between 252 to 247 million years ago) or even earlier.

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Flowering plants
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Research yields understanding of Darwins 'abominable mystery'

Research by Indiana University paleobotanist David L. Dilcher and colleagues in Europe sheds new light on what Charles Darwin famously called "an abominable mystery": the apparently sudden appearance and rapid spread of flowering plants in the fossil record.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers present a scenario in which flowering plants, or angiosperms, evolved and colonized various types of aquatic environments over about 45 million years in the early to middle Cretaceous Period.

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Posts: 131433
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Archaefructus liaoningensis
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A eudicot from the Early Cretaceous of China

The current molecular systematics of angiosperms recognises the basal angiosperms and five major angiosperm lineages: the Chloranthaceae, the magnoliids, the monocots, Ceratophyllum and the eudicots, which consist of the basal eudicots and the core eudicots. The eudicots form the majority of the angiosperms in the world today. The flowering plants are of exceptional evolutionary interest because of their diversity of over 250,000 species and their abundance as the dominant vegetation in most terrestrial ecosystems, but little is known of their very early history. In this report we document an early presence of eudicots during the Early Cretaceous Period. Diagnostic characters of the eudicot fossil Leefructus gen. nov. include simple and deeply trilobate leaves clustered at the nodes in threes or fours, basal palinactinodromous primary venation, pinnate secondary venation, and a long axillary reproductive axis terminating in a flattened receptacle bearing five long, narrow pseudo-syncarpous carpels. These morphological characters suggest that its affinities are with the Ranunculaceae, a basal eudicot family. The fossil co-occurs with Archaefructus sinensis and Hyrcantha decussata whereas Archaefructus liaoningensis comes from more ancient sediments. Multiple radiometric dates of the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation place the bed yielding this fossil at 122.6-125.8 million years old. The earliest fossil records of eudicots are 127 to 125 million years old, on the basis of pollen. Thus, Leefructus gen. nov. suggests that the basal eudicots were already present and diverse by the latest Barremian and earliest Aptian.


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Daffodil
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Oxford scientists in daffodil discovery

Scientists in Oxford believe they have solved an age-old botanical mystery, surrounding Wales' national flower.
All flowers are made from four key elements - but new research suggests the daffodil's distinctive trumpet is, in fact, a new fifth element.

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Narcissus
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Oxford scientists say trumpets in daffodils are 'new organ'

Flowers are usually built from the same basic four parts: sepals, petals, stamens and carpels, but daffodils also have a fifth part, known as the trumpet, or corona.
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Flowers
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The great explosion in flowering plants during the Cretaceous period is one of the great enigmas of evolution.
Charles Darwin had no explanation, calling it an 'abominable mystery'.
But now scientists think they've solved the riddle of how flowers came to dominate the conifers and ferns that preceded them.
The flowers' secret, they say, was to exploit a change in soil fertility, and create a feedback loop that allowed new flowers to feed off dead ones.


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Angiosperms
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Charles Darwin described the sudden origin of flowering plants about 130 million years ago as an abominable mystery, one that scientists have yet to solve.
But a new University of Florida study, set to appear in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is helping shed light on the mystery with information about what the first flowers looked like and how they evolved from nonflowering plants.

"There was nothing like them before and nothing like them since. The origin of the flower is the key to the origin of the angiosperms" - Andre Chanderbali, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral associate at UF's Florida Museum of Natural History.

The goal of this research is to understand the original regulatory program, or set of genetic switches, that produced the first flower in the common ancestor of all living flowering plants, said Pam Soltis, study co-author and curator of molecular systematics and evolutionary genetics at the Florida Museum.

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