LiveScience has a story about the oldest known example of a flower bud. Researchers in China have discovered a fossil flower bud from 164 million years ago. The new plant species, Florigerminis jurassica, was found in Inner Mongolia. The description was published in the journal Geological Society of London.
There are two main types of plants: flowering plants, known as angiosperms, and non-flowering plants, known as gymnosperms. The flower bud and fruit in the fossil are both clear indicators that F. 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. "But I am not so surprised," he added.
