Else Marie Friis

Else Marie Friis

Else Marie Friis is Professor and Head of Palaeobotany at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. She has published more than 100 highly cited papers on the early diversification and evolution of flowering plants.

The fossil record of flowering plants:

Does it solve Darwin´s mystery?

¹Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, Sweden
²University of Aarhus, Århus, Denmark
³University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

The origin and early diversification of angiosperms was focus of much debate during the later half of the 19th century. Darwin was puzzled by the apparent sudden appearance of angiosperms in the Cenomanian (Late Cretaceous), while older floras were dominated by ferns, cycads and conifers without traces of dicotyledons. Even more puzzling was that the Cenomanian angiosperms were common and apparently already highly derived, similar in compositions to modern floras, and several authors were inclined to refer them to much younger strata. This discussion was the background for Darwin´s famous quote in a letter to J. D. Hooker 22 July 1879, “The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery". The “abominable mystery" has since then been tightly linked to the origin and diversification of flowering plants (angiosperms).

Darwin speculated about a long pre-Cretaceous history for angiosperms in remote areas that have left no fossil signals. Improved stratigraphic framework for the Cretaceous floras and spectacular insights into the reproductive structures of ancient angiosperms from many different levels in the Cretaceous have greatly changed our view of early angiosperm evolution. It is now clear that angiosperms were also diverse during the Early Cretaceous and show a distinct pattern of gradual increase in diversity and complexity through the Early Cretaceous to the mid-Cretaceous, where angiosperms attained ecological dominance at least in some areas. The new findings also show that there is a fundamental difference between Cretaceous angiosperm vegetation and modern angiosperm-dominated vegetation.