Floral time travel: Flowers were more diverse 100 million years ago than they are today

An international team of researchers led by botanists at the University of Vienna, Austria, has analyzed the morphological diversity of fossilized flowers and compared it with the diversity of living species. They found that flowering plants had already produced a large number of different flower types shortly after their emergence in the Cretaceous period, and this earliest floral diversity was greater than that today.

The study has been published in the journal New Phytologist.