RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Fossil data do not support a long pre-Cretaceous history of flowering plants
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.02.16.431478
DO 10.1101/2021.02.16.431478
A1 Graham E. Budd
A1 Richard P. Mann
A1 James A. Doyle
A1 Mario Coiro
A1 Jason Hilton
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/02/17/2021.02.16.431478.abstract
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.