Flowering Plants' Roots Pushed Back 100M Years

Rambo Tribble writes "Frontiers in Plant Science has published research which suggests that angiosperms' origins are a lot older than we have thought; 100 million years older, in fact. This puts the roots of these plants in the Triassic, not the Cretaceous, as previously thought."

Comments

Re:Thus providing another example of scientific er

[Samantha Wright]

Apple trees are angiosperms.

The Tree of Knowledge is an apple tree.

Eris throws an apple in the central Discordian myth.

And outside of that, other trees feature prominently in various myths (Yggdrasil is a yew tree, tree roots resemble the FSM's noodly appendages...)

I think we have a pretty healthy respect for certain angiosperms, even if they're not outright worshipped as a group.

The found pollen

[cusco]

What they found was pollen, of a type normally found later in the fossil record. That they found a variety of different forms of pollen suggests that angiosperms had been around long enough to have diversified already, so this is probably not the last that we'll hear about this.