Scientists identify ‘mother (and father)’ to flowering plants of today

A 140 million-year-old bloom bearing a striking resemblance to a water lily was the mother (and father) of every flowering plant liv- ing today, scientists believe.

No fossils of the flower have been found, but scientists inferred what it must have looked like after analysing a mass of botanical data.

The first angiosperm, or flowering plant, had a simple arrangement of layered petals and contained both male and female reproductive organs, according to the study.

Flowering plants evolved relatively recently during the age of the dinosaurs, brightening up a drab planet previously dominated by ferns, horsetails and mosses.

Today, angiosperms represent 90 per cent of all land plants and are vital to the survival of terrestrial life.

For the new study, scientists led by Dr Herve Sauquet, from the University of Paris-sud in France, combined models of flower evolution with information from a huge database of present-day floral traits.

A picture of their reconstructed primeval flower appears in the latest issue of the journal Nature Communications.

The researchers wrote: “These results are a major step forward for understanding the origin of floral diversity and evolution in angiosperms as a whole.”