Ladies and Gentlemen, Here is the World’s First Flower!

Clapway has taught you how to grow flowers in space, we recently reported a story about mutated flowers and we have a whole category about Ecology. How could we resist this one?

According to researchers, the world’s first flower has just been discovered in Spain and it is nothing more than an aquatic plant. Named Montsechia vidalii, it existed 130,000,000 years ago — kind of.

MONTSECHIA VS. ARCHAEFRUCTUS SINENSIS

Groups of scientists based on the United States and Europe (Germany, Spain and France) wrote on their study published on Monday, that this ancient flower, Montsechia, may be older than Archaefructus Sinensis, another aquatic, 124.5-million-year-old plant from China that is also has been announced in the past as one of the first angiosperms in the world. Angiosperms are a large, infamous group of different plants but what is unclear is when they began producing beautiful buds, a feature that has made them quite popular today.

However, Montsechia’s descendants, Ceratophyllum, are found widely in lakes in almost every single country in the world, and there are six species of them discovered living among us in the modern day.

THE FIRST FLOWER, THOUGH, IS A MYTH

Even though Montsechia is, indeed, the oldest flower found to date, David Dilcher, Indiana University’s paleobotanist and lead author of the study, says that: “A first flower is a myth, like the ‘first human,'” and explains that it is hard to tell which flower is the first one because we will never be sure there was an earlier plant that first evolved, but perished leaving no trace behind. Still, getting to learn more will help us find out how these and more plants, as organisms, lived:

“This discovery raises significant questions about the early evolutionary history of flowering plants, as well as the role of these plants in the evolution of other plant and animal life,” Dilcher says.

THE WORLD’S FIRST FLOWER, DOES NOT LOOK LIKE A FLOWER AT ALL

Dilcher and his colleagues studied more than 1,000 fossilized remains of Montsechia using minuscule drops of hydrochloric acid to reveal structures hidden by stone. While this estimation gave more information about the age of the plant, it didn’t reveal structures that every day — not specialized people would recognize as a flower.

Dilcher says that Montsechia has no obvious “flower parts” (petals, nectar producers etc) and lives its whole life under water. “The fruit contains a single seed,” just like most of the angiosperms, “which is borne upside down.”

In fact, Montsechia looks more like a modern hornwort, a submerged aquatic plant with narrow forked leaves that becomes translucent and corneous as it ages.

“There’s still much to be discovered about how a few early species of seed-bearing plants eventually gave rise to the enormous, and beautiful, variety of flowers that now populate nearly every environment on Earth,” Dilcher said.

FOR MORE ECOLOGY NEWS, HERE IS THE LINK YOU’LL WANT TO VISIT — YOU’RE WELCOME!


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