BBC Earth
Image: Moyan_Brenn
It was, Charles Darwin wrote in 1879, “an abominable mystery”. Elsewhere he described it as “a most perplexing phenomenon”. Twenty years after the publication of his seminal work The Origin of Species, there were still aspects of evolution that bothered the father of evolutionary biology. Chief among these was the flower problem.
Flowering plants from gardenias to grasses, water lilies to wheat belong to a large and diverse group called the angiosperms. Unlike almost all other types of plants, they produce fruits that contain seeds. What worried Darwin was that the very earliest samples in the fossil record all dated back to the middle of the Cretaceous period, around 100 million years ago, and they came in a bewilderingly wide variety of shapes and sizes. This suggested flowering plants had experienced an explosive burst of diversity very shortly after their origins – which, if true, threatened to undermine Darwin’s entire model of gradual evolution through natural selection. Read more on the BBC Earth website…
