World’s first ‘flower’ revealed: 130-million-year-old aquatic plant may have

The discovery took a century to properly uncover and extensive analysis of over 1,000 fossils, but it has now given scientists a better insight in the evolutionary path of plant life and altered their view on how prehistoric flowers might’ve looked like.

– Picture by Denver Museum of Nature & Science via The New York TimesMIAMI, August 18 – An ancient plant that grew underwater in what is modern day Europe, had no petals and bore one single seed may have been the world’s first known flowering plant, a study said yesterday.

This aquatic plant named Montsechia vidalii once grew abundantly in freshwater lakes in what are now mountainous regions in Spain.

The research, reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, dated the plant at between 125 million and 130million years old and showed that despite appearances it was a flowering species.

“Lower Cretaceous aquatic angiosperms, such as Archaefructus and Montsechia, open the possibility that aquatic plants were locally common at a very early stage of angiosperm evolution and that aquatic habitats may have played a major role in the diversification of some early angiosperm lineages”, the study authors wrote.

Stems and leaf structures were coaxed from the fossil stone by applying hydrochloric acid drop-by-drop and were then examined under a microscope.

The term “first flower” however is technically incorrect.

David Dilcher and his colleagues might like to think of Montsechia vidalii as the earliest angiosperm ever to grown and breed on Earth, but the fact of the matter is there are other contender to this title.

A 100 million-year-old plant has been “caught in the act” after being encased in amber during pollination.

Dilcher and an global team of researchers analysed more than 1000 fossilised remains of Montsechia. The two species evolved around the same time, but, at least for now, scientists can’t say for sure which of them was the first to emerge.

“Montsechia possesses no obvious ‘flower parts, ‘ such as petals or nectar-producing structures for attracting insects, and lives out its entire life cycle under water”, Dilcher said in a statement. “The fruit contains a single seed” – the defining characteristic of an angiosperm – “which is borne upside down”. Also known as coontails or hornworts, Ceratophyllum is a dark green aquatic plant whose coarse, tufty leaves make it a popular decoration in modern aquariums and koi ponds.

“There’s still much to be discovered about how a few early species of seed-bearing plants eventually gave rise to the enormous, and lovely, variety of flowers that now populate almost every environment on Earth”, Dilcher said.