The explosion in the diversity of life on Earth may have been caused by the evolution of flowering plants, according to a paper.
Most of the plants we eat, drink, wear, and build with are flowering. They're called angiosperms, which means'seed vessels' in Greek.
More than a million species of insects owe their existence to angiosperms, which include bees, butterflies, and beetles, according to Pennsylvania State University paleobotanist Peter Wil.
These insects are eaten by many animals.
It's been said that most species on Earth lived in the oceans, which makes sense since these watery places cover over 70% of our planet's surface. Most of life's diversity is found on land.
The changeover is thought to have occurred around 100 million years ago, and was driven by flowering plants, according to a recent literature review. Several innovations in angiosperm biology were associated with it.
The evolution of more fruit-eating animals was a result of a massive increase in fruit and seed size, which was a driver for the emergence of many of the plant families we know today.
The New Phytologist Trust is headed by Mike Benton.
The rise of angiosperms was preceded by massive expansions in the biodiversity of modern plants, fungi, and animals.
The last 70 million years of the age of dinosaurs saw flowering plants become more common.
Dinosaurs didn't choose to eat them, and continued eating conifers. After the dinosaurs went extinct, angiosperms really took off on evolutionary terms.
The team suspects we overlooked the event because it was overshadowed by the extinction event that knocked non-avian dinosaurs out of the picture.
The asteroid impact destroyed many types of creatures, including 70 percent of marine species, but the insects, birds, mammals, and reptiles on land won out.
Peter Wilf, a paleobotanist from Pennsylvania State University, believes that the removal of the dinosaurs may have triggered the events.
The team suggests that the floral evolutionary experiments have driven life on land to be more diverse.
As flowering plants spread into different habitats, evolution twisted them into a dazzling array of new forms. New opportunities for the other life around them were created by the new varieties of structures, chemicals, and reproductive strategies.
The angiosperms created enormous numbers of niches for other plants and animals, so you get tens more species on eachhectare of Earth's surface than you would if they had not become established.
The plants were trading more energy because of the increase in productivity.
"They can capture more of the Sun's energy than conifers and their relatives, and this extra energy passes through the whole system," says evolutionary biologist Hervé Sauquet from the Royal Botanic Gardens.
From fossil evidence, the reconstruction of an early angiosperm, Archaefructus. Rebecca Horwitt is a person.
The resulting new food sources, from luscious vegetation to high-energy treats for pollinators, created many mutualistic relationships between these plants and animals, triggering a cascade of other new opportunities for biodiversity through to the very top predator.
"Angiosperms drive the evolution of the animals that pollinate them, mainly insects, and they can build complex forest structures which are homes to thousands of species," says Sauquet.
As the invaders increased in number, they also began to affect the local climate. The climate and water cycles are altered by higher rates of transpiration.
This allowed angiosperms to increase the extent of wet tropic environments and expand the habitats of many other species, from frog to fungi and even for the other plants that preceded them like ferns. It was a win-win situation.
conifer forests, based around the pine family, contain fewer species of other plants or animals, and they probably were never as species-rich," says Sauquet.
angiosperms were able to increase their diversity more than other plants because of differences in genetics. They have relatively small genomes with fewer chromosomes, despite the fact that they can result in more chromosomes. The mechanisms that reduce their genomes may be what allows them to grow.
Gymnosperms have higher trait flexibility than angiosperms, the researchers say.
This may have allowed flowering plants to bloom. It became our regime.
The review was published in a magazine.
