GAINESVILLE, Fla., Feb. 25 (UPI) -- University of Florida scientists say a DNA study they conducted has made clearer the origins of flowering plants from peas to oak trees.
The researchers said the extensive analysis of plant genomes they conducted unraveled 100 million years of evolution, focusing on one of the major moments in plant evolution -- when the ancestors of most of the world's flowering plants split into two major groups.
The scientists at the university's Florida Museum of Natural History said the two groups make up nearly 70 percent of all flowering plants and are part of a larger clade known as Pentapetalae. The researchers said understanding how these plants are related is a large undertaking that could help ecologists better understand which species are more vulnerable to environmental factors such as climate change.
Shortly after the two groups split, they simultaneously embarked upon a rapid burst of new species that lasted 5 million years. The study, said the scientists, shows how those species are related and sheds further light on the emergence of flowering plants -- an evolutionary phenomenon described by Charles Darwin as an abominable mystery.
"This paper and others show flowering plants as layer after layer of bursts of evolution," said Professor Doug Soltis, a study co-author. "Now it's falling together into two big groups."
The research that included Professor Pam Soltis appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
