Flowering Plants

130 million years
or 32 meters to today

Geolo­gicial era: Meso­zoic / Cretaceous

The devel­op­ment of flower­ing plants prob­ably began about 200 million years ago, with some plants creat­ing multiple copies of their entire genetic mater­ial in an indi­vidual (poly­ploidy). Further changes in the multi­plied chro­mo­somes led to the form­a­tion of flowers. This devel­op­ment must have taken place several times, which is shown by the large number of basic flower construc­tion plans.
However, the oldest fossil­ized flower­ing plants are only about 130 million years old and very sparse, so their devel­op­ment is not yet well under­stood. They may have evolved from ferns that have been around for 400 million years. The flower­ing plants influ­ence the devel­op­ment of insects and vice versa.

The climate is consist­ently warm. The coun­try is ice-free, there­fore the sea level is high. The atmo­sphere contains 1.5 times more oxygen and 4 times more CO2 than today. Gond­wana contin­ues to break apart. Australia separ­ates from Antarc­tica and Africa from South Amer­ica, India also splits off.

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