Today, flowering plants (or angiosperms) make up around four-fifths of all the green plants on Earth, but for billions of years they weren't around at all.

Besides amassing hundreds of fossil records, the team also compared their time tree with more than 16 million points of geographical data indicating which plants are flowering where.

Taking in 435 flowering plant families in all, the chart shows modern lineages starting to emerge around 100 to 90 million years ago, before they diversified into modern-day flowering spcies around 66 million years ago – this is the difference between the 'stem' age of a species (when it originated) and its 'crown' age (when it started to diversify into the species we know today).

"By estimating both the stem and crown ages for angiosperm families we found a difference of 37 to 56 million years between family origins and the beginning of their diversification into the living species we see today," says evolutionary biologist Susana Magallón, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.