Flowering plants rule most terrestrial ecosystems , provide the mass of human food . However , their origin has been a mystery since the earliest days of evolutionary thought .
Angiosperm flowers are hugely diverse . The key fruit to clear up the extraction of flowers and how angiosperms might be come to to other sort of industrial plant is understanding the organic evolution of the role of the blossom , especially angiosperm seeds and the fruits in which the seeds develop .
Fossil seed - bearing structures preserved in a new discovered Early Cretaceous - silicified peat in Inner Mongolia , China , bring home the bacon a partial answer to the ancestry of flowering plant life , accord to a study led by Prof. SHI Gongle from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences ( NIGPAS ) .
The fossils , which date from about 126 million years ago , support an earlier musical theme that the distinctive forbidden covering of developing seed of blossom plants — the so - called 2d integument — is essentially comparable to structures that occur in sure nonextant non - angiosperm source plants from the " Age of Dinosaurs . "
The seeds of cycad , ginkgo and conifers are enclosed and protected by a single integument , which is believed to correspond to the inner integument in flowering plant . However , the out ( second ) integument is a unique social system . Its exploitation is join to its curious recurvate form and is ensure by different genes than those responsible for the ontogeny of the inner integument .
Recurved structuresThese fossils , exceptionally well preserved and abundant in the silicified peat from China , have two seed shut in inside a specialized recurved anatomical structure — the acorn cup .
standardized cupules pass off in several groups of extinct plants from the Mesozoic that are known only from fossils , and while it has been intimate some of these cupules may be precursors of the second integument of flower plants , discussions have been hampered by unequal data .
The young fogy from China , along with the followup of antecedently draw fogey , intimate that the recurve cupule found in several groups of extinct source plant from the Mesozoic are all basically interchangeable and are likely the precursor of the second integument of flowering plants .
The recurve structure seen in the untested ejaculate of flowering plant life is therefore a holdover from an earlier pre - angiosperm phase of evolution . Variation among extinct Mesozoic seed plants in the number of come per acorn cup and other feature probably mull difference of opinion relating to pollenation , as well as seed output , security , and dispersal .
identification of extinct seeded player plant with a structure comparable to a key feature of living angiosperms leave a partial response to the question of flower plant life lineage . It also helps rivet future study on understanding how living and fossil groups of seminal fluid plants are interrelated , and has significant logical implication for ideas on the ancestry of another symptomatic feature of flowering plants that plainly make out later — the carpel — the social organisation that forms the yield wall in which the seed modernize .
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