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ABOMINABLE MYSTERY. "Darwin called their sudden appearance in the fossil record an “abominable mystery.” Since Darwin's time, we have been able to clarify that picture a little bit. Even so, our understanding of the origin of the angiosperm lineage is dubious at best. When and why did flowers evolve? There is scant fossil evidence to illustrate the early evolutionary steps in this development of flowers." https://lnkd.in/euP3eDr View in LinkedIn

"MICHAEL LYNCH once wrote, “Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of population genetics” (Distinguished professor of biology, Indiana University). http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

SECOND IN RICHNESS. "As the dominant plant taxon, angiosperms are estimated to contain at least 350,000 extant species, placing them second only to insects in terms of species richness. This contrasts with their ancient woody competitors, the gymnosperms, which are apparently in stasis and comprise less than 1,000 species." https://lnkd.in/eyHApyP View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first weekend in flowering plants and their rapid emergence and domination of the plant world. Due to the innovation of flowers, their co-evolution with pollinating insects, and other structural modifications of their forms, this group of plants was able to diversify rapidly. A flower is not just a flower. It is an historical testament to complex co-evolution and innovation. View in LinkedIn

DOMINANT PLANTS. "Our world is an angiosperm world. The roughly 350,000 known species of flowering plants make up about 90% of all living plant species. Without them, we would have none of our major crops including those used to feed livestock, and one of the most important carbon sinks that mop up our carbon dioxide emissions would be missing." https://lnkd.in/e27U-gk View in LinkedIn

"THE EVOLUTION of seed plants and later angiosperms appears to be the result of two distinct rounds of whole genome duplication events. These occurred at 319 million years ago and 192 million years ago. Another possible whole genome duplication event at 160 million years ago perhaps created the ancestral line that led to all modern flowering plants." https://lnkd.in/en2Nbzs View in LinkedIn

FLOWERING PLANTS. "Angiosperms are seed-producing plants; they are distinguished from gymnosperms by characteristics including flowers, endosperm within the seeds, and the production of fruits that contain the seeds. Etymologically, angiosperm means a plant that produces seeds within an enclosure, in other words, a fruiting plant." https://lnkd.in/en2Nbzs View in LinkedIn

VAST STRUCTURAL DIVERSITY. "Flowers, the reproductive organs of angiosperms, are more varied than the equivalent structures of any other group of organisms. Because of this variation, interest in plant sexual diversity has a long and venerable history in biology. However, despite this attention, it is still not obvious why flowering plants have evolved such extraordinarily diverse means to achieve only one primary function — mating success." https://lnkd.in/eSndawa View in LinkedIn

CLIMATIC EVOLUTION. "The Early Cretaceous configuration (120 Ma) appears as pivotal, with the global onset of new climatic conditions (higher rainfall and temperatures) which can favor macroevolutionary changes in the flora, such as angiosperm diversification." https://lnkd.in/eiM6qET View in LinkedIn

INDEPENDENT EVOLUTIONARY PATH. "During higher plant evolution, plants drastically increased the complexity of their bodies, with recent angiosperms representing the most evolved plants. It seems that the first roots, shoots, and leaves evolved together with the evolution of the first xylem and phloem elements, representing the vascular system. Roots and shoots, as well as vascular elements, followed an independent evolutionary path in vascular plants." https://lnkd.in/eDvT22D View in LinkedIn