164 million-year-old plant fossil is the oldest example of a flowering bud - Livescience.com

The discovery changes what we know about the evolution of flowering plants, researchers say.

The discovery firmly pushes back the emergence of flowering plants into the Jurassic period, between 145 million and 201 million years ago. .

There are two main types of plants: flowering plants, known as angiosperms, and non-flowering plants, known as gymnosperms.

jurassica was an angiosperm and not a gymnosperm, which was the dominant plant type during the Jurassic period.

Until now, fossil evidence has shown that angiosperms did not arise until the Cretaceous period, between 66 million and 145 million years ago, but the new fossil is the most convincing evidence yet that this was not the case. .

"Many paleobotanists are surprised [by the fossil], as it is quite different from what is stated in books," senior author Xin Wang, a researcher at Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS), told Live Science in an email.

The new fossil is not the oldest example of a fossilized flower to ever be discovered.

In 2018, in a study published in eLife, researchers described 174 million-year-old flowers from a plant in the genus Nanjinganthus, also found in China, Live Science previously reported. .

Wang believes that several other known plant genera from the Jurassic period, including Nanjinganthus, Juraherba, Yuhania, Jurafructus, Xingxueanthus and Schmeissneria, could also potentially be angiosperms, but he says there is no way to tell for sure without fossil evidence.

Originally published on Live Science