Communication
Version 1
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Shaolinia: A Fossil Post Between Conifers and Angiosperms
Version 1
: Received: 7 June 2024 / Approved: 10 June 2024 / Online: 11 June 2024 (11:24:36 CEST)
How to cite: Wang, X.; Chen, L.-J. Shaolinia: A Fossil Post Between Conifers and Angiosperms. Preprints 2024, 2024060649. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202406.0649.v1 Wang, X.; Chen, L.-J. Shaolinia: A Fossil Post Between Conifers and Angiosperms. Preprints 2024, 2024060649. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202406.0649.v1
Abstract
The greatly diversified flowering plants (angiosperms) are the dominating and defining group in the current earth ecosystem. However, from which group by what way the flowers, especially their gynoecia (key characteristics of angiosperms), are derived have been the questions in botany unanswered over centuries. Such an embarrassing situation can be attributed to the lack of plants with partially enclosed ovules, which are supposed to be a post between gymnosperms and angi-osperms. Here we report a fossil plant that has an apparent coniferous vegetative and reproduc-tive morphologies but has a single seed partially wrapped by the subtending bract. Such a mor-phology suggests that the carpels in angiosperms may be equivalent to bracts enclosing their axil-lary seed(s). Such a non-traditional interpretation of the homology of angiosperm carpels is com-patible with various new progresses made in botany and is in line with Tomlinson’s recent hy-pothesis. Together with other fossil evidence reported recently, it appears that gynoecia in angio-sperms are derived in multiple ways.
Keywords
angiosperms; conifers; carpel; homology; scale; placenta
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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