57. What Did the First Flower Smell Like?
Darwin worried about when and where flowering plants first appeared. In the intervening 150 years, researchers have tried—and failed—to answer that question. But last May, paleobotanists at the Florida Museum of Natural History and at Jilin University in Changchun, China, announced fossil remains of "probably the most complete, oldest flowering plant in the world," says David Dilcher, a scientist who analyzed the 125-million-year-old fossils. The age of the plant, unearthed from a lake bed in China, is less startling than its appearance. Dogma in the field maintains that angiosperms, as flowering plants are called, evolved from shrubs that resembled modern magnolia trees. Yet Archaefructus sinensis is a small, fleshy, aquatic plant that looks more like an herb than a flowering tree. It has the reproductive organs of a flower but no brightly colored petals. — Rabiya S. Tuma
67. Plants That Don't ...
