Very old flowers. A fun New Yorker piece on some fossils.
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Around that time, Friis met Pedersen, a young paleobotany professor in Aarhus, who was curious about the origins of flowering plants. “It always bothered me that we had so few fossils and [so little] knowledge about the early evolution of angiosperms,” he told me, in an e-mail. Pedersen was impressed by Friis’s skill at describing Cenozoic fossils, and he thought she might be able to apply similar methods to older material. So he introduced her to a colleague, Annie Skarby, who was looking for fossil pollen in southern Sweden and kept finding black specks in her sieve. When Friis placed them under a microscope, she saw a whole range of flowers, from unopened buds to mature blossoms, that dated to around eighty million years ago. “We understood that it was something special,” Friis told me.
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