Scientists have found a fossil plant with leaves, a fruit and a flower bud in rocks from Inner Mongolia. These are distinctive features of angiosperms, the scientific term for flowering plants. The fossil plant has been named Florigerminis jurassica and is one of the oldest dated flowering plants found so far. The fossil is dated as 164 million years old, placing it in the Jurassic period of the evolutionary timetable.
Until recently angiosperm plants were believed to have evolved in the Cretaceous, (65 – 145 million years ago) but scientists have speculated they must have evolved far earlier so they had time to evolve the great diversity of flowering plants that exists now and in the fossil record. This problem was noted by Darwin, who called the origin of flowering plants an “abominable mystery”. The research team who studied Florigerminis jurassica commented that their specimen along with two other recently discovered Jurassic fossil flowers “demands a rethinking of angiosperm evolution”.
Sources: Science Alert 16 January 2022; Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 6 January 2022, doi: 10.1144/SP521-2021-122
Editorial Comment: Every time someone finds a fossil flowering plant in Jurassic or early Cretaceous rocks they claim to have solved Darwin’s abominable mystery. However, finding a fully formed flowering plant never solves the mystery of how non-flowering plants turned into flowering plants because, like this new fossil, it is already a flowering plant.
In fact, this “mystery” will never be solved because it exists only in the minds of Darwin and his followers. Flowering plants have always been flowering plants. The evidence supports that, just as Genesis explains it, because God created all plants according to their kinds, which included the plants we now classify as angiosperms. See Genesis 1:11-12. It’s seen in both the fossil record, and in our observations of living plants, which always reproduce after their kind.
Creation Research News 9 February 2022
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