Mermaid
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virus: Solving Charles Darwin's "Abominable Mystery"
« on: 2003-05-18 01:31:01 » |
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This isnt breaking news, but it did come up during a #sl4 chat on irc and I
thought that it was interesting enough to share..
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast17apr_1.htm?list118443
Solving Charles Darwin's "Abominable Mystery"
Scientists are using chemical fossils to hunt down one of our planet's most
vexing missing links -- the first-ever flowering plant.
According to the fossil record, mosses were the first plants to emerge on
land, some 425 million years ago, followed by ferns, firs, ginkgoes,
conifers and several other varieties. Then, it seems, about 130 million
years ago flowering plants abruptly appeared out of nowhere.
Where did they come from, and how could they have evolved so suddenly
without any transitional fossils linking them to other ancient plant
species?
"An abominable mystery" is how nineteenth-century naturalist Charles Darwin
referred to the origin of flowering plants, and the puzzle remains as
controversial today as ever.
Now a team of Stanford geochemists has entered the debate with evidence that
flowering plants may have evolved 250 million years ago - long before the
first pollen grain appeared in the fossil record.
related url: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/12.16/angiosperms.html
Called Amborella, the plant is the one remaining species of a lineage that
first appeared on Earth more than 140 million years ago, while dinosaurs
still ruled the planet. The other flowering plants, from which it branched,
evolved and diversified until they came to dominate Earth at about the same
time as the mammalian ancestors of humans were replacing dinosaurs.
Flowering plants now number 250,000 different species, including virtually
all the vegetables and grains we eat, as well as most of the food of the
animals that we consume.
if you really wanted to know more, you'd click!
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