Fossil Friday: Darwin’s Abominable Mystery Corroborated Once Again
This Fossil Friday features the earliest known flowering plant, Montsechia vidalii, from the Lower Cretaceous of Las Hoyas in Spain, which has been dated to an age of about 130 million years. In several previous articles (Bechly 2021 a-d, 2022a-d, 2023, 2024) I reported about the “abominable mystery” of the sudden appearance of flowering plants in the Early Cretaceous period, which bothered Charles Darwin himself as a big problem for his theory. Last year, I discussed (Bechly 2023) a new study, which confirmed this discontinuity in the history of plants as “surely the greatest conundrum in the whole of paleontology” according to the lead author of this study, distinguished paleontologist Philip Donoghue.
Now, another new seminal study by Zuntini et al. (2024), published on April 24 by 278 (!) co-authors in the prestigious journal Nature, provided further strong corroboration of the “abominable mystery”. Like several previous studies the scientists attempt to illuminate the origin of flowering plants with a combination of phylogenetic inferences and molecular clock data. The authors mention that previous studies were flawed by the fact that “the limited and biased sampling of both taxa and genomes undermines confidence in the tree and its implications”. Therefore they built “the tree of life for almost 8,000 (about 60%) angiosperm genera using a standardized set of 353 nuclear genes”, which represents a “15-fold increase in genus-level sampling relative to comparable nuclear studies”. They scaled this tree to time using 200 fossils as calibration points for the dating of the branching events. Their results showed “that early angiosperm evolution was characterized by high gene tree conflict and explosive diversification, giving rise to more than 80% of extant angiosperm orders.”
An Explicit Conclusion
“Our lineage-through-time (LTT) heatmap and diversification rate estimates through time both indicate an explosive early phase of diversification of extant lineages during the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous Periods. An early burst of angiosperm diversification, popularized as ‘Darwin’s abominable mystery’, is expected given the sudden emergence of diverse angiosperm fossils during the Early Cretaceous. Phylogenetic studies based on single or few genes have also implied that angiosperms diversified rapidly in the Early Cretaceous. Our dated tree corroborates the existence of a distinct early burst of diversification, associated with high levels of gene tree conflict, further increasing our confidence in this finding.
More than 80% of extant angiosperm orders originated during the early burst of diversification. Although not strictly comparable because of their subjective delimitation, orders represent the main components of angiosperm feature diversity, which have arisen rapidly after the crown node of angiosperms. In the young tree, the early burst occurs during the Cretaceous, consistent with the hypothesis that a Cretaceous terrestrial revolution was triggered by the establishment of main angiosperm lineages. More controversially, the old tree places the early burst in the Triassic Period, which is dramatically at variance with the palaeobotanical record, highlighting that current molecular dating methods are unable to resolve the age of angiosperms.”
Since this notorious discontinuity in the fossil record did not get any smaller with 160 years of paleobotanical research since Darwin, but instead became more and more acute and empirically corroborated, we can be very sure that the gap is not a gap of knowledge but a real gap in nature. This contradicts Darwin’s explicit dictum that nature does not make jumps. Nature clearly did make jumps in the history of life (Bechly 2024) and this cannot be explained with an unguided gradual accumulation of small changes over long periods of time, but requires a rapid burst of biological novelty that is best explained by intelligent design.
References
Bechly G 2021a. Darwin’s “Abominable Mystery”: Still Alive and Kicking. Evolution News June 11, 2021. https://evolutionnews.org/2021/06/darwins-abominable-mystery-still-alive-and-kicking/
Bechly G 2021b. Darwin’s “Abominable Mystery” Is Not Alone: Gaps Everywhere! Evolution News June 12, 2021. https://evolutionnews.org/2021/06/darwins-abominable-mystery-is-not-alone-gaps-everywhere/
Bechly G 2021c. Darwin’s “Abominable Mystery”: Jurassic Flowering Plants After All? Evolution News June 14, 2021. https://evolutionnews.org/2021/06/darwins-abominable-mystery-jurassic-flowering-plants-after-all/
Bechly G 2021d. Darwin’s “Abominable Mystery”: Mesozoic Cupules Come to the Rescue? Evolution News June 15, 2021. https://evolutionnews.org/2021/06/darwins-abominable-mystery-mesozoic-cupules-come-to-the-rescue/
Bechly G 2022a. Fossil Friday: Flowering Plants — Darwin’s Abominable Mystery. Evolution News October 21, 2022. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/10/fossil-friday-flowering-plants-darwins-abominable-mystery/
Bechly G 2022b. Fossil Friday: Florigerminis, Another Failed Candidate for a Jurassic Flowering Plant. Evolution News November 18, 2022. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/11/fossil-friday-florigerminis-another-failed-candidate-for-a-jurassic-flowering-plant/
Bechly G 2022c. Fossil Friday: Is Triassic Angiosperm-Like Pollen a Solution to Darwin’s Abominable Mystery? Evolution News December 2, 2022. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/12/fossil-friday-is-triassic-angiosperm-like-pollen-a-solution-to-darwins-abominable-mystery/
Bechly G 2022d. Educating “Professor Dave” on the Fossil Record and Genetics. Evolution News December 8, 2022. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/12/educating-professor-dave-on-the-fossil-record-and-genetics/
Bechly G 2023. Fossil Friday: New Study Confirms Discontinuities in the History of Plants. Evolution News October 27, 2023. https://evolutionnews.org/2023/10/fossil-friday-new-study-confirms-discontinuities-in-the-history-of-plants/
Bechly G 2024. Fossil Friday: Discontinuities in the Fossil Record — A Problem for Neo-Darwinism. Evolution News May 10, 2024. https://evolutionnews.org/2024/05/fossil-friday-discontinuities-in-the-fossil-record-a-problem-for-neo-darwinism/
Zuntini AR, Carruthers T, Maurin O et al. 2024. Phylogenomics and the rise of the angiosperms. Nature 629, 843–850. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07324-0
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