Living Fossil Plant

The reproductive structure of the Amborella, a living fossil plant that has survived for 130 million years and found in the rain forests of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, may be a missing link between flowering plants and their ancestors, suggests a new study.

The Amborella plant has a unique way of forming eggs that may present a link between the flowering plants known as angiosperms and their yet to be identified ancestors, said study author William "Ned" Friedman, a University of Colorado professor.

Angiosperms are thought to have diverged from gymnosperms, the dominant land plants when dinosaurs reigned in the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods, roughly 130 million years ago, and have become the dominant plants on Earth today.

"One of the biggest challenges for evolutionary biologists is understanding how these flowering plants arose on Earth," said Friedman. "The study shows that the structure that houses the egg in Amborella is different from every other flowering plant known, and may be the potential missing link between flowering plants and their progenitors."

The origin and evolution of flowering plants has long confounded scientists, Friedman said. Nearly 130 years ago, Charles Darwin, known for developing the theory of natural selection, called the appearance of flowering plants "an abominable mystery."

The details of this study appear in the May 18 issue of Nature.

--LiveScience Staff

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Credit: Thomas Lemieux, University of Colorado at Boulder