The first flower in the world. Here's what it was like

    Have you ever thought about how it could be the first flower to appear on earth? Well, a new study indicates the characteristics of the ancestor of all current flowers that lived about 140 million years ago.

    Have you ever thought about how it could be the first flower appeared on earth? Well a new study indicates the ancestor characteristics of all current flowers that lived around 140 million years ago.





    A research team from the University of Paris-South has seen the results of their study on the ancestral flower, the first flower born on our planet, published in Nature Communications. What characteristics did it have?

    To reconstruct the appearance of the first flower, scientists carefully evaluated the shapes of 792 modern descendants, tracing their history and analyzing their characteristics, including for example the structure of the petals and sepals. This was possible thanks to the joint work of dozens of researchers who participated in the project with their scientific data eFLOWER thus creating the largest database dedicated to modern flowers.

    By combining this data with a DNA-based family tree and fossil information, the scientists came to establish and reproduce in 3D the appearance of the progenitor flower that no longer exists.

    As stated by Hervé Sauquet, head of the research:

    “There is no living flower exactly the same as the ancestral one and why should there be? This is a flower that existed at least 140 million years ago and it took a long time to evolve into the incredible variety of flowers that exist today "

    Although the reconstructed ancestral flower does not look particularly different from many other modern flowers (it looks like a water lily for example) it actually is. It was in fact a bisexual species (that is, it included both male and female parts) and had multiple concentric cycles of petals that originated from the same point. The researchers were especially surprised by the latter characteristic, namely that petals and organs were organized in concentric circles in groups of three and not in spirals.


    The first flower in the world. Here's what it was like The first flower in the world. Here's what it was like

    Before this study the origins of the flowers were little known mainly due to the scarcity of available fossil remains, the first preserved flowers date back to around 130 million years ago, at least 10 million years after, according to scholars, the first flower on earth appeared.


    Now this discovery, on which there is still to study to better understand the characteristics of the ancestral flower, marks an important step to deepen even more our knowledge of the different flower species and their evolution.



    On flowers, you may also be interested in:

    • 10 PLANTS THAT BLOOM IN SPRING
    • 10 PLANTS THAT BLOOM IN WINTER

    It seems impossible that flowers so different in characteristics, shapes and colors could have the same origin, yet this research shows that plants also have a common ancestor!

    Photo: nature.com

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