Jingszo !

According to existing research, the very first land plants emerged in the Ordovician geological period, roughly 485 to 444 million years ago. At first there were mosses, then ferns, ginkgos and conifers. Flowering plants—now the most diverse group of land plants—did not appear until more than 300 million years later.

Researchers have now identified the oldest pollen produced by eudicot flowering plants in sedimentary successions from Portugal. Together with their team, Prof. Dr. Ulrich Heimhofer of the LUH Institute of Earth System Sciences and Dr. Julia Gravendyck of the Bonn Institute of Organismic Biology at the University of Bonn identified fossilized angiosperm pollen from coastal marine sediments deposited within the Lusitanian Basin in Portugal. They dated these deposits to approximately 123 million years ago.

How the flowering plants developed, and from which plants, remains unclear. What is considered fact, however, is that angiosperms had a lasting impact on the development of life on our planet. They significantly enriched the diversity of species on Earth.