PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Graham E. Budd
AU  - Richard P. Mann
AU  - James A. Doyle
AU  - Mario Coiro
AU  - Jason Hilton
TI  - Fossil data do not support a long pre-Cretaceous history of flowering plants
AID  - 10.1101/2021.02.16.431478
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.02.16.431478
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/02/17/2021.02.16.431478.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/02/17/2021.02.16.431478.full
AB  - The origin of angiosperms is a classic macroevolutionary problem, because of their rapid rise in the Early Cretaceous fossil record, beginning about 139 Ma ago, and the conflict this creates with older crown-group ages based on molecular clock dating1. Silvestro et al.2 use a novel methodology to model past angiosperm diversity based on a Bayesian Brownian Bridge model of fossil finds assigned to extant families, concluding that a Cretaceous origin is vanishingly unlikely. However, their results strongly conflict with the known temporal distribution of angiosperm fossils, and, while we agree that statistical analysis aids interpretation of the fossil record, here we show the conclusions of Silvestro et al.2 are unsound.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.