Fossil Flowers
Dakota Formation, Central Kansas
This flower was preserved about 100 million years ago, along with some 200 other
kinds of flowering plants, or angiosperms. Flowering plants evolved a reproductive
cycle that was more energy efficient than that of earlier seed-bearing plants.
Unlike their predecessors, flowering plants provide nutritive tissue only to
seeds that have already been fertilized. This energy-saving adaptation was one
of the reasons angiosperms eventually came to outnumber all other plant types.
Today, nearly all the plants we eat, and most of those we see, are flowering
plants.
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Early Land Plant |
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Fossil Flowers |
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