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Asked by anon-360528 to Alison on 23 Mar 2023.
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Alison Tidy answered on 23 Mar 2023:
There are lots of unsolved mysteries within botany, and we are working towards understanding them. Probably the biggest and most difficult to solve is the mystery of the evolution of flowering plants, known as Darwin’s abominable mystery of botany/plants. What is the exact evolutionary history of flowers, as they are in modern day. Early plants were algaes and ferns which reproduce using spores, and then flowering plants having pollen and ovules appear almost suddenly in the Early Cretaceous and there appears to be no continuous fossil evidence showing how flowers evolved. We are therefore unsure how flowering plants came into being, and what evolutionary steps were taken.
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Comments
Sam commented on :
for me, I think there is a really interesting question about insects that eat plants. most insects are very fussy eaters- they only eat one type of plant. When you feed them a different type of plant they don’t eat it, or if they do eat it they die.
But there are a much smaller numbers of insects that can eat lots and lots of different types of plants. What makes them special? Why can they eat so many different types of plant without being poisoned? And if they can do it why can’t most other insects do it?
Phil commented on :
As questions go that’s a banger. I’m not sure it counts as a mystery, but I’m always astonished by the fact that plants can vary so much in turns of genome size (the genome is the instruction booklet of inside every living cell). One of the biggest UK trees, the horse chestnut that gives us beautiful conkers every autumn, has a genome that is a similar size to the small thale cress plant Arabidopsis used by many plant scientists as an experimental model. How does that work?