Fossil data yields understanding of Darwin's 'abominable
mystery' New research has shed new light on what Charles Darwin
famously called "an abominable mystery": the apparently sudden
appearance and rapid spread of flowering plants in the fossil
record. Indiana University paleobotanist David L. Dilcher and
colleagues in Europe have presented a scenario in which
flowering plants, or angiosperms, evolved and colonized various
types of aquatic environments over about 45 million years in the
early to middle Cretaceous Period. The work is based on
extensive fossil data from Europe and provides a comprehensive
picture of how angiosperms evolved and connect their evolution
with changes in the physical and biological environments.
Dilcher, who has studied the rise and spread of flowering plants
for decades, said the scenario is consistent with findings from
the fossil record in North America, including his own work
showing that angiosperms occupied a variety of aquatic and near-
aquatic environments. "This attention t