Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The fossil history of flowering plants records the development of flowers and other distinctive structures of the angiosperms, now the dominant group of plants on land.The history is controversial as flowering plants appear in great diversity in the Cretaceous, with scanty and debatable records before that, creating a puzzle for evolutionary biologists that Charles Darwin named an "abominable ...
The term angiosperm fundamentally changed in meaning in 1827 with Robert Brown, when angiosperm came to mean a seed plant with enclosed ovules. [ 35 ] [ 36 ] In 1851, with Wilhelm Hofmeister 's work on embryo-sacs, Angiosperm came to have its modern meaning of all the flowering plants including Dicotyledons and Monocotyledons.
Flowering plants, also known as angiosperms, spread during this period, although they did not become predominant until near the end of the period (Campanian age). [18] Their evolution was aided by the appearance of bees; in fact angiosperms and insects are a good example of coevolution.
The angiosperms and their ancestors played a very small role until they diversified during the Cretaceous. They started out as small, damp-loving organisms in the understorey, and have been diversifying ever since the Cretaceous, [101] to become the dominant member of non-boreal forests today.
Similarly, bee pollinator diversification strongly correlates with angiosperm flower appearance and specialization during the same era. [21] Flies, already successful pollinators before the rise of angiosperms, [22] quickly adapted to the new hosts. [23] Beetles became pollinators of angiosperms by the earliest part of the Late Cretaceous.
Many of the dominant taxonomic groups present in modern times can be ultimately traced back to origins in the Cretaceous. During this time, new groups of mammals and birds appeared, including the earliest relatives of placentals & marsupials ( Eutheria and Metatheria respectively), with the earliest crown group birds appearing towards to the ...
A group of wasps sister to the bees evolved at the same time as flowering plants, as did the Lepidoptera. [14] Further, all the major clades of bees first appeared between the middle and late Cretaceous, simultaneously with the adaptive radiation of the eudicots (three quarters of all angiosperms), and at the time when the angiosperms became ...
No living land plant has equally dominant sporophytes and gametophytes, although some theories of the evolution of alternation of generations suggest that ancestral land plants did. Unequal (heteromorphy or anisomorphy). Gametophyte of Mnium hornum, a moss . Dominant gametophyte (gametophytic).