Deriving Miss Daisy reported in Science vol. 329 p. 1605, 24 September 2010: The plant family Asteraceae is one of the most familiar among living plants mainly because of their distinctive flower heads, which are actually a tight aggregation of small individual flowers surrounded by leaf-like structures called phyllaries. Daisies, chrysanthemums, gerberas and sunflowers are members of this group. However, fossil flowers are rare, being mainly represented in the fossil records by pollen rather than whole flowers. Researchers have now found a cluster of “unusually well preserved” fossil flowers that have the distinct features of Asteraceae in Patagonia in South America. Like living Asteraceae the fossil flowers consist of a flower head of tightly clustered individual flowers surrounded by phyllaries. The fossils are dated at 47.5 million years old, making them the oldest Asteraceae. Tod Stuessy of the Department of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, University of Vienna, commented that the new fossil “sheds light on the history of this successful plant family and adds to evidence that it originated in southern South America about 50 million years ago.”
Editorial Comment: The only light this fossil sheds on the history of this plant family is that Asteraceae have always been Asteraceae. They are no help to the theory that daisies, etc. evolved from some lesser plant, but it does fit with Genesis, which tells us plants were created as fully formed, distinct kinds. As Asteraceae with the same distinctive features are still here we have irrefutable evidence they have multiplied after their kind from the time they are first recorded on planet earth. (Ref. botany, flora, angiosperms)
Evidence News 27 Oct 2010