New light shed on Charles Darwin's 'abominable mystery' - BBC News

The famous naturalist was haunted by the question of how the first flowering plants evolved.

Darwin feared this inexplicable puzzle would undermine his theories of evolution, says Prof Richard Buggs.

"The mystery seems to have been made particularly abominable to him by its highly publicised use by the keeper of botany at the British Museum to argue for divine intervention in the history of life," he says.

In a letter to his closest friend, botanist and explorer Dr Joseph Hooker, he wrote: "The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery.".

"In the fossil record they appear very suddenly in the Cretaceous, dated at about 100 million years ago, and there's nothing that looks like an angiosperm before them and then they suddenly appear and in considerable diversity," says Prof Buggs?

Questions raised by the sudden appearance of flowering plants are at the heart of Darwin's abominable mystery, he explains.

Darwin was deeply bothered by how flowering plants conquered the world seemingly in the blink of an eye, while other large groups, such as the mammals, evolved gradually.

Darwin toyed with the idea that flowering plants might have evolved on an as yet undiscovered island or continent.

In the library at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Prof Buggs came across a re-print of a lecture from 1876 by the Scottish botanist William Carruthers that gives new context to Darwin's thinking.

In a lecture to the Geologists Association in the library of University College London, Carruthers highlighted the problems that Darwin had with the fossil record, focussing on the sudden appearance of flowering plants.

"Carruthers was using the abominable mystery to launch an attack on evolution itself," says Prof Buggs.

The points Carruthers was making about the fossil record were actually very difficult to explain in terms of evolution, says Prof Buggs.

"One hundred and forty years later, the mystery's still unsolved," says Prof Buggs.

How flowering plants conquered the world