Fossil flower

Friis, E. M., Pedersen, K. R. and Crane, P. R. (2010). Diversity in obscurity fossil flowers and the early history of angiosperms. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,... 

Fossil flowers related to Laurales are particularly significant in Cretaceous mesofossil floras and first appear around the Albian. Such flowers were already widely distributed by the mid-Cretaceous, and fossils of Laurales remain common through the Late Cretaceous. The Cretaceous fossil record of Laurales includes Virginianthus calycanthoid.es from the Early-Middle Albian Puddledock locality, Virginia, USA (Friis et al., 1994), and Jerseyanthus... 

Notwithstanding these broad similarities, flowers of Hernandiaceae differ from the fossil flower in having an inferior ovary. However, an inferior ovary is also present in many genera of Lauraceae that diverge at an early stage from the main line of diversification in the family. For example an inferior ovary is found in Hypodaphnis, which is the sister to all other genera and mayindicate that an inferior... 

Table 3.2 Summary of androecium characters from Cretaceous fossil flowers and flower fragments with supposed lauraceous affinity.

Crepet, W. L. and Nixon, K. C. (1998). Two new fossil flowers of magnoliid affinity from the Late Cretaceous of New lersey. American Journal of Botany, 85,1273-1288. 

Takahashi, M., Crane, P. R. and Ando, El. (1999). Fossil flowers and associated plant fossils from the Kamikitaba locality (Ashizawa Formation,... 

Schonenberger, ]. (2005). Rise from the ashes - reconstruction of charcoal fossil flowers. Treruis in Plant Science, 10, 436 3. 

Crepet WL, Herendeen PS (1992) Papilionoid flowers from the early Eocene of southeastern North America. In Advances in Legume Systematics, Part 4 The Fossil Record. Herendeen PS Dilcher DL (eds) The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK... 

There is simply no firm fossil evidence identifying primordial biochemistry. In the evolution of flowering plants, the fossil record is rather... 

Rose, N. L, P. G. Appleby, J. F. Boyle, A. W. Mackay R. J. Flower, 1998a. The spatial and temporal distribution of fossil-fuel derived pollutants in the sediment record of Lake Baikal, eastern Siberia. J. Paleolim. 20 151-162. 

Williams, D.M., Khursevich, G.K, Fedenya, S. A, Flower, R.J. (2006). The fossil record in Lake Baikal Comments on the diversity and duration of... 

Although we know that birds and flowers evolved much later, Antarctica was a wetter and warmer place in the Permo-Triassic than it is at the present time (Collinson 1997). In addition, the existence of very similar floras in the sedimentary rocks of Permo-Triassic age on all of the southern continents can only be explained by the break-up of Gondwana followed by the displacement of the continental fragments. This aspect of the paleobotany of the southern continents was the theme of a book edited by Taylor and Taylor (1990). In 1962, Doumani and Long could only speculate that the climate change implied by the fossil record required either that the poles had wandered or the continents had drifted. 

A central subject to our understanding of flowers is how and when they diverged in evolution. This question has been pursued from several angles such as molecular phylogenetics and evolutionary developmental genetics, as well as morphology, including extant taxa and fossils (e.g. Bateman, Hilton and Rudall, 2006 Doyle, 2008 Doyle and Endress, 2010 Endress and Doyle, 2009 Friis, Pedersen and Crane, 2010 Frohlich, 2006 Soltis et al., 2009 Soltis and Soltis, 2004 Theissen and Melzer, 2007). 

Moreover, the much-discussed Early Cretaceous fossil angiosperm Archae-fructus (Archaefructaceae) and the recently recognized extant near-basal angiosperm Trithuria (Hydatellaceae) are unhelpfully ambivalent in both senses (Rudall et al., 2008 Rudall and Bateman, 2010). The reproductive truss of Archaefructus has been interpreted as being either a single flower lacking axial condensation (Sun et al., 2002) or an inflorescence of several unisexual flowers, the males... 

The character combination observed in the Powhatania flower is found mainly in Lauraceae and Hernandiaceae, but also in Monimiaceae. The paired nectariferous structures associated with the first androecial whorl are distinctive and suggest a closer affinity to Hernandiaceae and Lauraceae. The limited number of characters and specimens available preclude more detailed phylogenetic placement. Cohongarootonia shares most floral characters with Lauraceae and Hernandiaceae and may represent a separate and now extinct lineage along the stem of Lauraceae/Hernandiaceae clade. Together with other lauraceous fossils... 

In Endress and Doyle (2009) we presented inferences on the evolution of all the floral characters in our data set, emphasizing implications for the morphology of the ancestral flower and for suggestions that the simple flowers of living and fossil aquatic taxa might be ancestral. Here we take a complementary,... 

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