Flowering plants appeared two million years earlier than we thought

The arrival of flowering plants reshaped the living world. They filled it with color, scent, and new ways to thrive. But when did it all begin?

For centuries, scientists have chased that answer. They studied fossils, analyzed leaves, and dug deep into Earth’s layers. And now, with the help of something as small as dust, a research team from Germany may have brought us closer to the truth.

They didn’t find a forest. They didn’t find flowers. What they found was four tiny grains of pollen – and those grains may change what we know about evolution.

Ancient pollen changes flower timeline

At just 20 micrometers wide, pollen grains are smaller than a human hair. You can’t see them floating past you on a breeze. But preserved in ancient rock, they act like time capsules.

Pollen grains hold stories about the plants that made them, the landscapes that held them, and the creatures that may have brushed past them.

Scientists from Leibniz University Hannover and the University of Bonn took a closer look at sedimentary layers in Portugal’s Lusitanian Basin. That region was once covered by a shallow sea. Over 100 million years ago, rivers flowed into it, carrying pollen and plant material from nearby land.

Buried beneath layers of sediment, the pollen fossilized. And when scientists scanned those layers using high-resolution laser microscopy, something rare flickered back at them – a type of pollen called tricolpate.

Tricolpate grains have three furrows on their surface. It’s not just a decorative feature. It’s a marker, a signal that these grains came from a particular group of plants: the eudicots.

The emergence of flowering plants

Eudicots make up the largest group of flowering plants today. They include roses, tomatoes, sunflowers, and more. Nearly three-quarters of all angiosperms fall into this category.

Finding tricolpate pollen in ancient marine sediment was exciting on its own. But what made the discovery groundbreaking was the age of the sediment.

Until now, most scientists believed that eudicots first appeared around 121 million years ago. These new grains? They were 123 million years old.

That might not seem like a big difference, but in evolutionary terms, two million years is enough time for significant changes to take root. Enough time for new traits to evolve, for ecosystems to shift, and for plant life to expand into new territories.

Professor Heimhofer noted that the emergence of flowering plants altered the biological diversity considerably. “But exactly where and when this development began has been an enigma that Darwin already called an ‘abominable mystery,'” said Dr. Gravendyck.

Flowering plants appeared much later

The planet has been green for a long time, but it didn’t always look the way it does now. The earliest land plants, like mosses, started appearing around 485 million years ago during the Ordovician period.

Later came ferns, ginkgos, and towering conifers. They dominated forests for hundreds of millions of years.

Flowering plants – angiosperms – arrived much later. Their sudden diversity puzzled Charles Darwin, who referred to their rapid appearance in the fossil record as a mystery that needed solving.

The team’s discovery of eudicot pollen helps chip away at that mystery. It not only pushes back the earliest known appearance of this plant group but also offers stronger, more reliable evidence of when and where it happened.

But finding pollen in the dirt isn’t enough. To make sure they had the date right, the researchers needed another kind of fossil – one that could speak for the ocean.

A record in seashell fossils

Alongside the pollen, the researchers found fossilized seashells made of calcium carbonate. These shells, shaped in ancient seawater, captured the chemical signature of the environment around them. One element in particular, strontium, proved useful.

Strontium isotopes shift over time in known patterns. By analyzing the isotope ratio in the shells, scientists matched them to reference curves that span millions of years. Think of it like geological carbon dating, but with shells instead of bones.

This method confirmed that the sediment layer dated to about 123 million years ago – exactly when the tricolpate pollen would have settled and fossilized.

This combination of pollen structure and strontium isotope dating gave the researchers something rare: a double-checked moment in time. The flowers had arrived earlier than expected.

Early flowers grew in cooler regions

There’s something else this discovery hints at – where these early flowers might have grown. For a long time, scientists assumed angiosperms started in warm, tropical environments. But the Lusitanian Basin, 123 million years ago, sat in the mid-latitudes. Not hot, not tropical.

That means early flowering plants may have been tougher and more widespread than expected. They weren’t just jungle plants. They may have thrived in places with seasons, cooler temperatures, or unpredictable climates.

This shift in location challenges old ideas. If flowers could bloom outside the tropics that early, they might have spread more quickly across the globe, adapting to a wide range of ecosystems as they moved.

A new way to study ancient life

The techniques used in this study are as important as the findings themselves. By combining high-resolution imaging with chemical dating, the team created a new way to approach plant evolution.

They didn’t rely on guesswork or single fossils. They used two independent systems to cross-check the age and origin of their samples.

The research could help scientists better understand other mysterious fossils – especially in places where traditional fossil records are patchy or unclear. Pollen, it turns out, may be one of our best tools for mapping the rise of plants.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may lead to more discoveries like this – tiny clues in forgotten sediments that rewrite big chapters in Earth’s story.

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