计算机模拟世界第一朵花的模样

All living flowers ultimately derive from a single ancestor that lived about 140 million years ago, a study suggests.

一项研究表明，地球上现存的所有花卉都起源于1.4亿年前的同一个“祖先”。
 

Scientists combined models of flower evolution with the largest data set of features from living flowers ever assembled.

From this the team was able to infer the appearance of the ancestral flower.

The flower had many concentric cycles of petal-like organs in sets of three, arranged in whorls, and was bisexual.

Hervé Sauquet, from Université Paris-Sud, France, one of the authors of the paper published last week in Nature Communications said: "There is no living flower that looks exactly like the ancestral one. This is a flower that existed at least 140 million years ago and has had considerable time to evolve into the incredible diversity of flowers that exist today."

To reconstruct the appearance of the first flower, the scientists recorded the features - such as the petals and sepals - of the flowers from 792 living species.

They mapped the distribution of these features on to the evolutionary tree of flowering plants enabling them to build a picture of what flowers looked like at key points in their history - including the last common ancestor of all living flowers.

The first flower is reconstructed with petal-like structures arranged in a whorl, so each petal appears in the same plane, like a common lily (but with more whorls), rather than in a spiral, where petals overlap in a spiral arrangement around the stem, like a lotus.