Flowers for the dinosaurs.

Flowers for the dinosaurs

While angiosperms, or flowering plants, dominate the modern landscape, they were just getting their start during the early Cretaceous period when dinosaurs roamed the land. Botanists have long pictured the earliest angiosperms as large plants, something like magnolia trees, but a newly identified fossil and other evidence suggest a much tinier image.

In the Feb. 9 SCIENCE, David Winship Taylor and Leo J. Hickey of Yale University describe an Australian fossil that shows the earliest known angiosperm flowers, dating back about 110 million years. Lacking petals and measuring about 1 millimeter across, the minute reproductive organs connect to two small leaves, each about 1 centimeter wide. The tiny size of the plant supports other evidence depicting the first angiosperms as small herb-like plants rather than trees, Taylor says.

This revision in thinking may help explain some problems paleobotanists have faced. Scientists who study pollen remains know that angiosperms evolved several million years before the time of this Australian fossil, yet they have had trouble finding fossils of wood, leaves or flowers from these earliest forms. According to Taylor, researchers may have been looking with the wrong picture in mind. Indeed, he notes, those who first described the Australian fossil did not realize it was an angiosperm and instead identified it as a fern.