The First Flower: Permocarpelloides shuozhouensis

Publication Info:

Transcript:

Xin Wang et al, Permian carpel-like organs and their implications on origin of angiosperms, Plant Biosystems (2026). DOI: 10.1007/s44473-026-00267-6

Meet Permocarpelloides shuozhouensis 🌺🦕 At almost 300 million years old, this newly discovered plant fossil might be shattering the record for the world's oldest flowering plant.

Episode 336

Notes:

Do you know how old all these flowering plants are? Wrong. Probably wrong. I don't know. I couldn't hear you, but I would have been wrong 24 hours ago. So, let's find out. The fossil evidence for the oldest angiosperms or flowering plants was from the Cretaceous, roughly 140 to 130 million years ago. And that's kind of been the prevailing wisdom for quite a while because quite frankly, there hasn't been solid evidence for anything earlier. There's been molecular clock data saying they should be there, but no one's found the fossils. There have been a couple possible older ones that were kind of debated and may or may not be true. And then there were some finds from the Permian that seemed convincing to some, not convincing to others cuz because they didn't really have the features the paleobotanists were expecting to see in flowering plants that old being things like free carpels, the kind of things that are assumed to be ancestral to modern flowering plants and even seen in some modern plants like magnolias. That said, apparently this new find is pretty convincing. This is Permocarpelloides and it's a genuinely exciting plant fossil because it has those features like free carpels that paleobotanists were expecting to see. But the really exciting part is it's from the early Permian, almost 300 million years ago, specifically 295. That is 160 plus million years older than the previous record for the oldest angiosperm. And working on closing that gap between the fossil evidence and the molecular clock data. As usual, if you want more information, here's the source.