According to a new release from the University of Zurich, flowers may have evolved 100 million years earlier than previously thought.

Flowering plants developed from archaic planets related to conifers, ginkgos, cycads and seed ferns. The earliest known fossils from flowering plants are pollen grains. These are tiny, strong and abundant and therefore fossilize more easily than leaves and flowers.

An unbroken sequence of fossilized pollen from flowers starts in the Early Cretaceous, about 140 million years ago, and it is commonly thought that flowering plans first developed around that time. But new research reveals flowering plant-like pollen that is 100 million years older, suggesting that flowering plants may have evolved in the Early Triassic or perhaps earlier. As LiveScience notes, this timeline implies that flowers may have existed when the first dinosaur was born.

A number of studies have attempted to approximate the age of flowering plants using molecular data, but so far no general agreement has been achieved. Based on dataset and technique, these approximations range from the Triassic to the Cretaceous. According to researchers, molecular approximations usually must be “anchored” in fossil evidence, but really old fossils were not available for flowering plants.

“That is why the present finding of flower-like pollen from the Triassic is significant,” said Peter Hochuli of the University of Zurich.

Hochuli and his colleague, Susanne Feist-Burkhardt of the Paleontological Institute and Museum at the University of Zurich, examined two drilling cores from Weiach and Leuggern in northern Switzerland and discovered pollen grains that look similar to fossil pollen from the earliest known flowering plants. Using Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy, they acquired high-res images across three dimensions of six varying types of pollen.

In earlier research dating back to 2004, the researchers described different, but obviously related flowering-plant-like pollen from the Middle Triassic in cores from the Barents Sea. The samples from their more recent research were discovered 3,000 kilometers south of the previous site.

“We believe that even highly cautious scientists will now be convinced that flowering plants evolved long before the Cretaceous,” Hochuli posited.

According to the researchers, the pollen’s structure implies that the flowering plants were pollinated by insects (likely beetles, as bees would not develop for another 100 million years).

What do you think of the study’s findings? Share your thoughts in the comments section.