How Fossil Flowers Rewrote the History of Life

Scientists believed the fossil record said nothing about the evolution of flowers. Else Marie Friis proved them wrong.

I’m not very active on social media these days, so I’m going to use this newsletter to share my writing with friends. Yesterday, The New Yorker published my profile of a Danish paleobotanist named Else Marie Friis. When Friis was a student, she learned that the evolution of flowering plants (known scientifically as angiosperms) was what Charles Darwin called an “abominable mystery.” Her professors said flowers were simply too delicate to fossilize. Over the last fifty years, however, Friis has found thousands of fossil flowers—not by splitting rocks with a hammer and chisel but by sifting loose sediments for tiny flecks of charcoal. With a microscope, she saw that many of the black pieces were actually blossoms that burned in forest fires more than eighty million years ago.

Plants are often portrayed as mere backdrop to the evolution of animals. After delving into Friis’s research, however, I’ve come to believe that the evolution of flowering plants is the most consequential development in life over the last two hundred million years—more impactful than the dinosaur extinction or the rise of mammals (including human beings).

Here’s an excerpt from the story:

In the botanical garden, Friis leaned into some ferns and came up nibbling on a shoot of sorrel. “This one is also an angiosperm,” she said. “I think you can eat it.” At a nearby café, Friis and I lunched on salads made from the leaves, fruits, and seeds of flowering plants. The dressing came from flowering grapevines and olive trees; the cheese, from livestock that adapted to eat grass. Human life probably never would have evolved without flowering plants—yet most popular histories of evolution pay little attention to them, and instead start with the lucky mammals who survived an apocalyptic asteroid. As an origin story, this account is almost Biblical in its drama: the skies rained fire and the meekest species inherited the Earth. Friis’s fossils have convinced me, though, that we must look past the mass extinction, deeper into the Cretaceous, to understand the origins of our world.

You can read the whole story here. Please share with anyone who might find it interesting and write me with your thoughts!