Origin of beauty
the ancestors of all grains, fruits, blossoms and life-sustaining crops may have been fragile water plants, indicates a recent discovery of almost intact fossils of some of the Earth's earliest flowering plants. The fossils were found in a bed of volcanic ash deposited in northeastern China more than 124 million years ago. Researchers from the University of Florida in Gainesville, usa, found the fossils in a sand-coloured slab of stone that they had extracted from a rock formation. They dubbed the fossil species Archaefructus liaoningensis and Archaefructus sinensis. Together, the finds make up the family called Archaefructaceae. Till now, botantists had considered a woody plant from Canada as the most ancient of flowering plants. But the new discovery precedes that species (www.nationalgeographic.com, May 10, 2002).
The discovery sheds light on the life and times of early members of a huge category of flora. "The mysteries of the origin and radiation of the flowering plants is one of the greatest dilemmas facing paleontology and evolutionary biology,' said William Crepet, plant biologist at Cornell University, usa. "The fossils represent the first evidence of an angiosperm that is basal to all other angiosperms. Yet they do not fit within any modern taxonomic group of angiosperms. This makes them one of, if not the most important fossils flowering plant ever reported,' added Crepet. By studying Archaefructaceae, scientists can analyse the ancestry of what sustains the world today. "Flowering plants are the basic food crop and fibre source for the world's population. The fossils will prove useful for us to understand the relationship among flowering plants, especially in this day of molecular genetic manipulations,' says David Dilcher, one of the researchers. "The finding could also help scientists understand the evolutionary history of the flowering plants
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