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Using two drilled core samples from northern Switzerland, researchers
from the University of Zurich have unearthed flowering plant fossils dating
back 240 million years. These are now the oldest known fossils of their kind. The
pollen grains provide evidence that flowering plants evolved 100 million years
earlier than previously thought. Researchers have described these as
Angiosperm-like pollen and Afropollis from the Middle Triassic of the Termanic
Basin.
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Flowering plants are the result of an evolution from extinct
plants related to conifers, ginkgos, cycads and seed ferns. Fossilized pollen
grains provide us with the best evidence of this. Up until now, scientists have
been able to document an uninterrupted sequence of pollen beginning in the
Early Cretaceous period leading scientists to believe that is when flowering
plants first originated. But solid evidence prior to that was heretofore not
conclusive.
These newly found pollens from the core samples clearly implant
the pollen fossil in the Triassic period where other studies have failed to
decisively ascertain. The closest that
any study has come is a 2004 study by these same determined researchers utilizing
a sample extracted from the Barents Sea much further north. Researchers Professor
Peter Hochuli and Susanne Feist-Burkhardt believe the newly discovered flowering
plants from these pollens to be related yet different indicating a “broad
ecological range”.
Understandably fossils of this age are very rare. Despite
that, much research has been conducted to determine the age of flowering plants
based upon molecular data. But these studies have not been conclusive because
the sampled molecular data has not been found “anchored” within any subject
Triassic fossils, “that is why the present finding of the flowerlike pollen
from the Triassic is significant,” says Hochuli.
Researchers used Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy to
extract images that establish their findings. This technology allows for
optical sectioning whereby data points are extracted individually and
reconstructed on a computer model one section at a time to recreate a 3
dimensional image. Hochuli and research partner Feist-Burkhardt speculate on what
the plants might have looked like from which the pollen came. Switzerland
landscape can be described as being a drier subtropical climate during the
Middle Triassic period. The structure of the pollen indicates that beetle like
insects would have pollinated these flowering plants, as bees wouldn’t exist
for another 100 million years.
Read more from the University
of Zurich.
Photo Credit: P.
Hochuli and Susanne Feist-Burkhardt, University of Zurich.
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