Darwin’s Abominable Mystery

Let's begin with a classic, what Charles Darwin himself described as a "disgusting riddle" in a letter to botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker - the rapid emergence of blooming or botanical plants. Angiosperms in the Early Cretaceous fossil record Darwin specifically included dicotyledonous flowering plants, i.e. species with dicotyledons, in his letter, but for decades the question has covered all seed plants. closed - how did they diversify so rapidly in such a short period of time? Darwin was especially agitated about this issue, not only because it appeared to contradict his theory, but also because some of his opponents were utilizing the enigma to argue "divine intervention."

In his latter years, Darwin proposed that there might have been an undiscovered island or continent somewhere where angiosperms started and evolved in isolation for millions of years before finding their way into the rest of the world and the known fossil record.

For nearly 150 years, biologists have been perplexed by the problem. There are theories - a new study from the University of Bristol published in early 2021 claimed that flowering plants simply appeared millions of years sooner than previously thought, giving them more time to diversify. But, in the absence of substantial evidence, Darwin's conundrum remains as awful as ever.