Science Literature

Many portrayals of habitats purporting to represent the Age of Dinosaurs have conifer trees and ferns, but very little ground cover. As palaeontologists continue their research, they are coming to recognise that the ecosystems were much more diverse. The earliest flowering plants are represented by pollen grains and considered to be about 130 Ma years old. However, diversity after this was rapid (see here). Recently, a strikingly beautiful fossil has been reported from China, in the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation.

"The fossil shows the above-ground portion of a mature plant. A single stem leads to five leaves, and one leads to a fully developed flower. The entire fossil is about 16 cm (6.3 in) tall. Leaves are innervated by branching veins, and the small, cup-shaped flower has five petals."

"Amazing. It just 'feels' like a modern plant, the whole gestalt is reminiscent of something you'd find in a meadow today." Comment from Per Ahlberg (Image source here).

The fossil remains are of a mature eudicot, a type of flowering plant. A taxonomic analysis of the plant's form has led to the fossil being placed among the Ranunculaceae, a family within the eudicots that includes buttercups and crowroot plants. By all assessments, the description in the journal Nature reveals a "remarkably developed species" rather than a primitive ancestral form. The sedimentary rock preserving this fossil has also yielded several other significant angiosperm species with an age considered to be about 124 Ma.

"This fossil opens up a new way of thinking about the evolution of some of the first flowering plants," said Indiana University Bloomington biologist David Dilcher, the Nature paper's American coauthor. "We are also beginning to understand that the explosive radiation of all flowering plants about 111 million years ago has had a long history that began with the slower diversification of many families of eudicots over 10, perhaps 15 million years earlier."

Some questions deserve to be asked about the phrase "slower diversification of many families of eudicots": if the evolution of the angiosperms was an "abominable mystery" to Darwin, the abrupt appearance of a "remarkably developed" member of the Ranunculaceae, with no earlier fossilised ancestors apart from pollen, deserves to be described as doubly abominable for Darwinism! The buttercup cousin is nothing like an intermediate form, but it has lots of features that are present in extant genera of the Ranunculaceae.

"When we look at the branching relationships of the tree for this group, the Ranunculaceae is at the end of several branches going to the other families, such as the poppies," Dilcher said. "As a result, we believe that prior to 122 to 124 million years ago, several families of flowering plants had already begun to diverge. How much older the eudicots are we do not know yet, but this fossil suggests their origin certainly goes further back in the Cretaceous, perhaps even into the Jurassic."

The earliest record of eudicots comes from fossil pollen dated at 125 Ma. The search is on for earlier body fossils and also for pollen. The problem for Darwinists is that they have no other avenues for interpreting the data. There is no alternative but to adopt the hypothesis of earlier incremental transformations to account for the evolution of angiosperms with subsequent diversification. To maintain credibility, they have to do what Darwin did and invoke the imperfection of the fossil record. But maybe they are pursuing a dream, and the data is actually calling them to wake up!

A eudicot from the Early Cretaceous of China
Ge Sun, David L. Dilcher, Hongshan Wang & Zhiduan Chen
Nature, 471, 625-628. (31 March 2011) | doi:10.1038/nature09811

Abstract: The current molecular systematics of angiosperms recognizes the basal angiosperms and five major angiosperm lineages: the Chloranthaceae, the magnoliids, the monocots, Ceratophyllum and the eudicots, which consist of the basal eudicots and the core eudicots. The eudicots form the majority of the angiosperms in the world today. The flowering plants are of exceptional evolutionary interest because of their diversity of over 250,000 species and their abundance as the dominant vegetation in most terrestrial ecosystems, but little is known of their very early history. In this report we document an early presence of eudicots during the Early Cretaceous Period. Diagnostic characters of the eudicot fossil Leefructus gen. nov. include simple and deeply trilobate leaves clustered at the nodes in threes or fours, basal palinactinodromous primary venation, pinnate secondary venation, and a long axillary reproductive axis terminating in a flattened receptacle bearing five long, narrow pseudo-syncarpous carpels. These morphological characters suggest that its affinities are with the Ranunculaceae, a basal eudicot family. The fossil co-occurs with Archaefructus sinensis and Hyrcantha decussata whereas Archaefructus liaoningensis comes from more ancient sediments. Multiple radiometric dates of the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation place the bed yielding this fossil at 122.6 - 125.8 million years old. The earliest fossil records of eudicots are 127 to 125 million years old, on the basis of pollen. Thus, Leefructus gen. nov. suggests that the basal eudicots were already present and diverse by the latest Barremian and earliest Aptian.

See also:

Fossil Is Best Look Yet at an Ancestor of Buttercups, ScienceDaily (Mar. 31, 2011)