World's earliest fossil flower found in China

New Delhi : In an attempt to explore the origin of flower, an international research team has discovered new evidence of the world's earliest fossil flower. Research team from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology has found the fossil flower from specimens unearthed in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing. 

Study confirms that the origin of flowering plants date back to 174 million years ago, or the Early Jurassic. As of now, the authors have named the fossil flower as Nanjinganthus dendrostyla, as mentioned in the open-access journal eLife.

To conduct a fruitful study, the team has studied 264 specimens of 198 individual flowers preserved on 34 slabs from the South Xiangshan Formation, an outcrop of rocks in the Nanjing region renowned for bearing fossils from the Early Jurassic epoch. This kind of Nanjing flower has four to five petals and looks like a modern plum blossom.

The discovery is the latest contribution in the field of botany. The findings have reshaped the current understanding of the evolution of flowers.

It was previously thought that the flowering plants have history fewer than 130 million years. But now, the updated research suggests that they existed 50 million years earlier than that, in the Early Jurassic. The Early Jurassic is known as the period that saw dinosaurs dominating the planet.