The World's First Flower, 140 Million Years Old & Bisexual, May Have Looked Like This

This 140-million-years-old bloom is now believed to be the last common ancestor of at least 300,000 species of flowers that exist today.

first flower

This ancestral flower has offered itself as an important puzzle solver for scientists who have long tried to ascertain the existence of the first flowers. Flowering plants date back to 140- to 250-million-years-ago. But since no fossil flowers could date back to over 130-million-years-ago, it became difficult to find their ancestors.

first flower

But the scientists got lucky!

According to a journal published in Nature Communications, an international team of researchers illustrates how they sketched out a family tree of flowering plants collated across 792 species. By doing so, they were able to find the structural properties of the plants' blooms and take it back to the ancestral flower.

Their research led them to the discovery of the ancestral flower that was bisexual. In other words, it had both male and female parts. It was also revealed that the flower's stamens, petals, and sepals, were arranged in concentric circles instead of in spirals and were called 'whorls' that had three petals or sepals arranged in each.

representative image

And to get to the present day living flowers, one simply has to remove some of the whorls and viola! It doesn't get more interesting than this.

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