Plant Diversity and Evolution

Flowering plants — the angiosperms — make up roughly 90 percent of all plant species on Earth, and understanding how they originated, diversified, and spread across continents requires integrating molecular data, fossil evidence, and ecological context into a coherent evolutionary picture. Researchers use phylogenetics to reconstruct the branching relationships among plant lineages, revealing when and where major groups arose and how shifts in climate, geography, or reproductive strategy drove bursts of diversification. Among the most active questions are why angiosperms diversified so rapidly after their origin roughly 140 million years ago — a puzzle Darwin famously called an "abominable mystery" — and how the historical movement of plant lineages across land bridges and ocean barriers shaped the uneven geographic distribution of diversity we see today. Advances in genome sequencing are now allowing scientists to resolve long-disputed relationships at finer scales and to test whether specific traits, such as flower structure or pollination mode, consistently accelerate or constrain evolutionary radiations.

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Keywords

Angiosperm PhylogenyFlowering PlantsBiogeographyDiversificationPhylogeneticsEvolutionary History