Blooming ancient: Beautiful fossilised plant had the first known flowers

A beautiful aquatic plant, dating back to the start of the Cretaceous period, is believed by scientists to be the oldest known flowering plant on Earth.

New analysis of the fossilised remains from central Spain and the Pyrenees show that the plant is about 130 million-years-old, meaning it was around at the same time as feathered dinosaurs.

The plant, Montsechia vidalii, resembles the modern-day coontail - commonly used to populate aquariums - and is thought to have grown underwater in shallow lakes.

The plant snatches the title of world’s oldest flower from the hands of another ancient plant, Archaefructus sinensis, discovered in 125 million-year-old fossils from Liaoning Province in China.

“The ‘first flower’ is a bit of a poetic concept, but that aside, we do believe this is the oldest we have discovered so far,” says David Dilcher at Indiana University, who led the analysis.

To study the ancient plant, Dilcher and his team slowly dissolved the limestone around more than 1000 fossils. This left them with small fragments of the plant that could then be bleached and their structure examined using powerful microscopes.

The plant appears to have had no roots or petals. Its leaves were arranged in two forms: either in a spiral or opposite one another along an axis. The plant sprouted several tiny flowers, each of which contained a single seed.