One of TPP's bright young colleagues, Herve Sauquet, has used a combination of morphology and molecular data to construct or model the first or ancestral flower. It has several whorls of 3 floral organs and to TPP's eyes, the model so derived looks a lot like a Magnolia virginiana. Many people have long thought that earliest flowers would have many spirally arranged parts. Actually there are several differences, so the similarity to a Magnolia is just superficial, mostly just the several perianth whorls. The oldest fossil flowers just don't look like this and molecular data suggests that flowering plants are older (149-256 my) than the fossil record indicates and so far no one has a really convincing pre-Cretaceous flowering plant fossil. Several pteridosperms in the fossil record have angiospermy features, but no certain flowering plant ancestor can be identified.
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