Plant Fossil

purchases made in 2019, up from 180 billion yuan ($27 billion) in 2014.

Chinese researchers have found a dinosaur-era plant fossil with leaves and fruits of different morphologies dating back about 125 million years in Lingyuan City, Liaoning Province in northeast China, Xinhua News Agency reported on November 10.

The plant, the Varifructuslingyuanesis, provides rare raw material for evaluating the evolution of flowers in the Early Cretaceous, the period about 145 million to 100 million years ago, according to Wang Xin, head of the research team from Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The discovery was made by the team and scholars from Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University in southeast China.

The preserved part of the plant is about 17 cm long and 12 cm wide, and includes multiple physically connected organs such as branches, leaves, a bud and fruits. The fruits are arranged in asymmetrical pairs, and two branching patterns are seen in this single specimen.

The plant is a type of angiosperm, the most advanced, diversified, and widely distributed plant group in the current ecosystem. But organs of most angiosperms nowadays have the same morphology, unlike the one found in the fossil.

“These variable patterns within a single plant indicate the morphological plasticity of angiosperms during the early period of their evolution,” Wang said.

The research findings have been published in the journal Historical Biology.