Fossilised remains of world’s oldest flower discovered in Spain

The plant, Montsechia vidalii dates back about 130 million years and was an aquatic plant which grew in shallow lakes , picture below is of the stunning fossil that has pushed the record back 5 million years as the first flowering plant species on record.

This plant was growing when Dinosaurs ruled the planet.

“This is a fascinating and provocative analysis of the new fossils,” says Sam Brockington, a research fellow in the department of plant sciences at Cambridge University. “It has always been difficult to say whether the first flowering plants emerged in aquatic conditions, but this paper emphasises how important aquatic environments were for the earliest flowering plants.”

Sometime in the middle of the Cretaceous period the diversification of the flowering plant population exploded, developing into the beautiful blooms we know today, as well as influencing the wildlife that evolved alongside. Dilcher says that we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for plants like Montsechia vidalii. “We are a product of the many stages of evolution that went hand-in-hand with the evolution of flowering plants,” he says.
www.theguardian.com...

That has to be the coolest fossil I've seen in some time.

Cool find, seems a little enhanced in some way. To me anyhow.

a reply to: EnigmaAgent

When I first saw it I thought you could probably put in a pot and it would grow

I wonder what colour it was? Yellow I'm imaging it.
Cool find dude.

a reply to: gortex

Thanks, it's really cool.

Before animals there were plants.....we come from the same "soup".

Where I live is one of the oldest known fossil beds around, you can find this kind of thing lying around the beaches of the harbour...the highest tides too lol.

I imagine it was a murky brownish green, not as much clear light reaching down there but enough to be warm.

Getting in touch with the beginning is what I love, such a long and dignified past.....survival.

All the best to you and yours may your journey through time be long.



Cheers!

Where I live you can travel to about an hour away and finding fossils is easy, lots of them. They are all sea creatures however and no where near as detailed as that.

Has it been enhanced as the above poster mentioned?

If not, that is incredibly detailed, stunning.

a reply to: gortex

When I first glanced at it, i thought of heather....

Then I read aquatic... very neat, I would have loved to see this flora in it's natural shallow lake environments.

a reply to: gortex

That's really something, gortex, great find. Very, very cool.

Alive 125 million years ago, at the same time as the Brachiosaurus dinosaur, the world's "first" flower has just been discovered. Montsechia vidalli, a nondescript pond weed, lived its entire life under water in the freshwater lakes of northern and central Spain. The flower does not have petals or bright colours as you would expect, but instead has fine fibres or leaves, resembling that of the common pond weed Ceratophyllum...

www.telegraph.co.uk...

Here's some Ceratophyllum for comparison:



It looks as if it was painted on the rock yesterday, not captured over 1 million years ago. Absolutely fantastic.

This could be a modern plant encrusted with a fine layer of mud... and how do we know someone didn't just carve it and plant it for later discovery?

I am, of course, kidding. Fine find and remarkable... things just keep getting older, it's hard to keep track... now flowering plants are 5 million years older then before... 20 million years older than my childhood paleontology books say, if memory is working today.

Plotting that graph, I have a theory that the origins of modern flora and fauna will be shown to be 20 million years older for every 20 years that pass in real time... or something like that.

a reply to: gortex

Amazing, it looks like something you could see today.

Its a sad thought that our planet is X billion years old yet we can only go back to see fossils some 130 million years old. It blows the mind to think how much we will never know or be able to see of what has existed in the past. With life existing so near vulcano vents deep in the ocean the possibilities must have been amazing.