When ORCHIDS ruled the Earth!
Entered By: grantb on August 30, 2007
No Observations
New Scientist confirms the fever-dreams of many a fanatic gardener with the discovery that mammals didn’t take over right after the death of the dinosaurs – orchids did:
Santiago Ramirez of Harvard University and colleagues compared genetic information from the fossilised Meliorchis caribea with modern-day plants and reconstructed an evolutionary tree. It suggests that the first orchids bloomed about 84 million years ago.
They flourished after the massive extinction event, blooming over the graves of all those dead giants.
