Jurassic Flower: Scientists discover fossil of Earth's oldest petal

Researchers have found a fossil with the oldest flower on earth: it enchanted Pangeia 174 million years ago! By then, the earliest fossil in a flower was 130 million years old, while computer programs had estimated that they had appeared at most 140 million years ago. The garden methuselah was called Najinganthus dendrostyla .

The vast majority of flowers appeared in the Cretaceous period, long after those little antiques there ... So this discovery is important as it can solve how "mysteriously" several flowers appeared in various parts of the planet at about the same time.

The research was done by scientists from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China. According to Qiang Fu, author of the research, 264 specimens of 198 different flowers preserved in rocky slabs found in the Xiangshan South Formation outside Nanjing, a site with a high incidence of Jurassic fossils, were analyzed.

N. dendrostyla is an angiosperm with spaced and spoon-shaped petals. Understanding them can help elucidate the family tree of flowers. The next question is whether the flower is a monophyletic angiosperm, just like its supposed descendants, or whether it is polyphyletic, which can tie an even larger knot in researchers' heads.