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ANGIOSPERM EVOLUTION

A Jurassic leap for flowering plants

Nature Plants volume 5, pages 455–456 (2019)Cite this article

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Comprehensive phylogenomics and molecular dating support a Triassic origin for flowering plants that is substantially earlier than their appearance in the fossil record, leaving a puzzling gap spanning the entire Jurassic period.

Flowering plants, or angiosperms, represent more than 95% of all vascular plant life on Earth, exhibiting unmatched ecological, functional and morphological diversity. While they presently dominate nearly all terrestrial environments, the early origins of flowering plants remain an enigma. Unequivocal angiosperm fossils are not known until the Cretaceous period, where an abrupt but enormous diversity of evidence appears. In fact, the apparently rapid and tremendous evolutionary diversification of angiosperms in the Cretaceous was the great “abominable mystery” of Darwin and many of his contemporaries1. Molecular clock dating has frequently suggested an earlier origin for angiosperms in the Jurassic (or even Triassic) period, such as that performed by Zeng et al.2. However, many studies have lacked extensive sampling, especially at the ordinal and familial levels. Now, in a new paper published in Nature Plants, Li et al.3 describe a comprehensive angiosperm phylogeny sampling nearly 3,000 chloroplast (plastid) genomes from species representing all 64 orders and 85% of the 416 flowering plant families. Molecular clock dating using 62 fossils as calibration points supports the earlier origin of flowering plants dating the crown group to the Late Triassic period (~209 million years ago (Ma)). This earlier age leaves a gap between the earliest fossils and the origin for flowering plants of almost 70 million years, roughly the entirety of the Jurassic period, and is coined by the authors as the ‘Jurassic angiosperm gap’.

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Fig. 1: A proposed timeline for the origin and evolution of flowering plants.

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  1. Department of Biological Sciences, The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA

    Jennifer R. Mandel

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  1. Jennifer R. Mandel
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Correspondence to Jennifer R. Mandel.

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Mandel, J.R. A Jurassic leap for flowering plants. Nat. Plants 5, 455–456 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-019-0423-y

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