Why the sudden rise of flowering plants remains a major scientific mystery
In short: Angiosperms, or flowering plants with seeds enclosed in fruit, make up over 90 percent of Earth's plant life. Despite their dominance, the timeline and mechanisms behind their rapid evolutionary spread remain one of the most persistent puzzles in modern biology.
Flowering plants are ubiquitous across the planet, yet their evolutionary history contains a significant gap spanning approximately 70 million years. This period of missing data obscures the transition that allowed angiosperms to become the dominant form of plant life on Earth.
Understanding this transition is essential for grasping the history of terrestrial ecosystems. Scientists continue to investigate how these plants emerged and diversified so successfully, as the exact sequence of events leading to their current ubiquity remains a subject of ongoing research.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Solving the 70 Million Year “Gap” in Flower Evolution
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