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Science 27 November 1998:
Vol. 282. no. 5394, pp. 1653 - 1654
DOI: 10.1126/science.282.5394.1653
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Perspectives

BOTANY:
The Abominable Mystery

William L. Crepet

The question of how flowering plants (called angiosperms) evolved and their relationship to other plants has puzzled botanists for a century--a riddle that Charles Darwin called the "abominable mystery." In his Perspective, Crepet discusses a new fossil discovery reported by Sun et al. in the same issue. Reproductive structures from northeast China are identified by Sun et al. as evidence for a Jurassic angiosperm. Crepet reviews the current understanding of angiosperm evolution and how this new finding fits into the picture of flowering plant origins.

The author is at the L. H. Bailey Hortorium, Division of Biological Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. E-mail: wlc1{at}cornell.edu

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