How flowering plants beat bloom-free gymnosperms to world dominance

Flowerless gymnosperms, specified arsenic conifer and ginkgo, ruled the Jurassic satellite earlier their flowering rivals, the angiosperms, became dominant. What caused the autumn of 1 and the emergence of the other?

Life 8 November 2022

By Penny Sarchet

Ben Giles

ARGUABLY the world’s weirdest plant, Welwitschia mirabilis is simply a tangled wide of shredded, fraying leaves successful the Namib desert. For a 1000 years, possibly more, it grows conscionable 2 agelong leaves, which creep continuously outwards for galore metres, becoming torn and ragged. The works is simply a lone survivor; fossils suggest its household dates backmost astatine slightest 112 cardinal years to the mediate of the Cretaceous, but each its adjacent relatives are gone.

This evolutionary orphan is simply a gymnosperm – plants that nutrient seeds, but not existent flowers oregon fruit. The astir acquainted contiguous are conifers, a radical that includes the longest surviving organisms connected Earth, the bristlecone pines, and the coastal redwood, the world’s tallest trees. But gymnosperms besides comprise gnetales (like W. mirabilis), the palm-like cycads and ginkgo, besides known arsenic the maidenhair tree. When dinosaurs roamed Earth, they walked among the gymnosperms, which dominated the land. But conscionable arsenic the dinosaur epoch ended with the Cretaceous, truthful excessively did the heyday of the gymnosperms. Today, determination are lone astir 1000 species, mostly conifers. They cling connected successful a satellite conquered by a 4th of a cardinal angiosperm taxon – the flowering plants.

What went wrong? Until recently, the communicative has been that gymnosperms didn’t basal a accidental against these beauteous newcomers. Flowers enabled angiosperms to usage insects for pollination, boosting their reproductive occurrence and spurring them connected to planetary dominance. But the latest probe reveals caller twists successful this past whodunnit. By amended knowing wherefore gymnosperms mislaid out, we whitethorn get immoderate clues astir their future, too.

Flowers person agelong been implicated successful the gymnosperms’ demise owed to timing: erstwhile …