
The ancestral flower of angiosperms and its early diversification - p4bl0
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms16047
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jonchang
One cautionary note with this study is that the methods employed (ancestral
character evolution) do not permit the inference of trait values that fall
outside of the observed range of extant variation. Adding fossils can
significantly improve our estimates of the root state but unfortunately in
this case there don't seem to be many fossil flowers to parameterize the
model.

There's been instances where using only data from extant species can mislead
with respect to the hypothesized ancestral state. For one example, see figure
5 in
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2012....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2012.01723.x/full)

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jonmc12
Recently I found TimeTree
([http://www.timetree.org/](http://www.timetree.org/)). The tool produces both
timelines and timetrees (ancestry) of taxonomies. Both tools provide a nice
context of the evolutionary environment. If you click through enough, you can
usually get to the underlying research for the data as well.

Try searching for taxons Spermatophyta (seed plants) and Magnoliophyta
(flowering plants) and to see the common ancestor of flowering plants.

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rwmj
Isn't there some kind of egg/chicken (flower/insect) problem here? What's the
evolutionary benefit of developing a flower unless insects also develop the
eyesight and coordination necessary to find nectar in the flower?

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Obi_Juan_Kenobi
* Not all flowers rely on insects for pollination, or any pollinators at all. Many are wind-pollinated or self-pollinating (not that the basal lineage would be asexual).

* Insects do not necessarily rely on eyesight for pollination. Scent, for instance, is a strong attractant.

* Insects need only be driven by a search for food for pollination to work. There is no requirement that they have specialized adaptations for nectar-gathering. Elaborate floral structures that require these adaptations evolved over time, along with their pollinators.

* One common flaw in evolutionary/adaptive thinking is assuming that efficient solutions must be present from the outset of an adaptive trait. Incidental effects that provide only the slightest increase in fitness can easily be fixed in a population.

Most importantly, though, this is really an investigation about structure.
This is a common theme in plant development; many plant structures are highly
analogous. Understanding the basal state of floral structures informs studies
one the gene regulatory networks that control plant shape. For some context,
I'd take a look at the well-characterized MADS-box genes.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_model_of_flower_developmen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_model_of_flower_development)

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baddox
I think you're mostly listing ways that both insect and flower could survive
before they both developed specific adaptations that aid in their mutual
interaction. But I feel like the more satisfying answer is that very gradual
changes in both species can eventually lead to two species that appear to be
extremely codependent.

In this case, I would guess that even the tiniest proto-flowers that resulted
from random mutations could just so happen to be discovered by insects with
the tiniest random mutations that led them there.

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gus_massa
IANAB. It's weird that it's so complex. I was expecting something very simple
like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bougainvillea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bougainvillea)
[https://www.google.com/search?q=Bougainvillea+flower&tbm=isc...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Bougainvillea+flower&tbm=isch)
that has only three petals that look like colored leaves.

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empath75
This isn't the 'first flower'. This is the first flower that is the most
recent common ancestor of all flowering plants. There are a lot of more
primitive flowers that lead up to this which are also common ancestors, but
not the most recent, as well as a lot of dead ends that didn't leave any
ancestors.

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iaabtpbtpnn
It looks sort of like a magnolia, which makes sense since those are ancient
flowers.

