What was the first angiosperm and when did it appear?
The origin of angiosperms is still a mystery. More than one-hundred years ago, Darwin called the origin of angiosperms an “abominable mystery”. Angiosperms appear rather suddenly in the fossil record, with no obvious ancestors for a period of about 80 to 90 million years prior to their appearance. Not even fossil leaves or pollen are known from this earlier time. The truth is that we just don’t have many early fossils of angiosperms, and those we do have are troublesome. Many of the early fossils show a mix of features which define modern groups, making them difficult to interpret. The implication, then, is that there was much experimentation in the early evolution of angiosperms, and only later did the features sort out into different lineages. The rapid diversification of angiosperm taxa began in the Albian, in the mid-Cretaceous, and has continued to this day. At that time, there is an almost exponential increase in angiosperm diversity, andmagnolia_blossom. there does not appear to
