late discovered dodo of pollen grains discovered in drilling cores that came out of Switzerland put the evolution of flowering plant at about100 million years earlierthan antecedently thought . They have been dated to 240 million age old , at the beginning of the Early Triassic period .
The plant settle from conifers , ginkos , fern , and cycads which were incredibly abundant around the metre they emerged .
These flowering industrial plant may have egress much earlier than antecedently believed , but they still do not show up with any consistency until around 140 million old age ago in the former Cretaceous full stop . Around this sentence , fossilized pollen grain in the fossil record start to appear continuous to present daylight .
Previously , molecular studies were used to calculate the age of the pollen , but the earliest sampling weresparse and often of poor quality , making it unbelievably difficult for scientists to hold on an accurate timeframe . The newly discovered pollen grains were in remarkably good condition , making it much easier to image and afterward date the sample . Peter Hochuli and Susanne Feist - Burkhardt from Paleontological Institute and Museum , University of Zürich experience that their oeuvre is so firm , they are convinced that even some of the more skeptical scientist will jibe that the evolutionary timeline of flowering plants has been pushed back to the Early Triassic , if not earlier .
Nearly ten years ago , the same research worker come up intimately related , though clearly dissimilar , pollen grains from a plant that lived in the Middle Triassic . The current samples were observe only 3000 kilometers ( 1860 miles ) away .
There is no way to assure what these earliest flowers may have looked like . Though Switzerland is presently lush and green , it was much more desiccate during the period that these flowers existed .
The structure of the pollen suggests that insects likely facilitate pollinate the early plants , though these new samples could not have been help by bees , as they would n’t be around for 100 million more years . Instead , it ’s most likely that beetle coinage had pollination duties .
