Computational biologist working on deep-time and cancer evolution
Ruolin WU
Dobby is free, Dobby has no master; Ruolin is free, Ruolin has not only a mater but also a PhD degree! 🤣
Did flowering plants really spend 100 million years hiding from the fossil record?
For decades, fossils and molecular clocks seemed to tell completely different stories.
This became known as the "Jurassic Gap".
What if the problem wasn't the fossil record?
The Jurassic Gap shrinks dramatically.
Rather than fossils and molecular clocks being in fundamental conflict, they may have been talking past each other.
When fossil evidence is incorporated more comprehensively, the two records tell a much more consistent story of flowering plant evolution.
Instead of relying on a handful of fossil calibrations, we analysed >25,000 fossil occurrences across flowering plant history and used them to inform molecular dating analyses.
The result surprised us. Our analyses place the origin of crown-group angiosperms at ~151–153 million years ago.
