We now know what the ancestor of today’s flowers looked like, thanks to scientists who used computer models to re-create the plant that lived 140 million years ago.
Before now, we didn’t understand much about the origin of most of today’s flowering plants, called angiosperms. (Angiosperms account for about 90 percent of all plants.) This is partly because flowers don’t preserve well, so fossils are rare. For a study published today in the journal Nature Communications, researchers used a database of flower traits and computer models of how flowers evolve to figure out what this ancestor might have looked like.
It rather resembles a white lily, with three layers of petals, called “whorls.” The models suggest that this first flower was...
from The Verge - All Posts http://ift.tt/2hkNGfA
via IFTTT
EmoticonEmoticon