Mario Vallejo-Marín
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 7 Aug
Mario Vallejo-Marín’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But we know based on the molecular evidence, how long the genes in flowering plants have been evolving for, that they probably were there around 140 to 250 million years ago.
In the genome of all organisms, you have written...
all the history that has accumulated there over their evolutionary time.
So the evidence of this age of flowering plants comes from looking at how genes evolve over time.
The way I imagine it is you take two plants that are alive today and look how they are different.
How long would it take for mutations to accumulate in order to give you that difference?
This is something that I also find extremely cool because in the absence of a fossil, how could you possibly tell how these first flowers looked like?
A few years ago, there was a really nice study.
It used the same principles.
Let's look at all the flowering plants that are alive today.
And try to reconstruct how that early flower must have looked like.
Our reconstruction is now based on what we know about flowers, so it might be a bit biased, the artist, in giving it features that look more like something that we have already seen.
But I still think it's really cool how just by doing detective work, you are able to piece together the shape and the form of a flower and the way that the different parts of the flower are arranged of something that occurred 100 or 120 million years ago.
And that is like an enduring mystery that Darwin recognised and still creates debate among modern evolutionary biologists.
It looks like a tipping point.
There was a little morphological change in the reproductive structures of plants for a long time and then somehow this flower idea appears and then it takes off really rapidly.
So it is, in evolutionary terms, a quick change.
The classic idea of why flowering plants, why flowers evolved and why flowering plants were so successful was that it allowed them to recruit helpers to move the genes around.
The flower allows to recruit pollinators and this just opens up the possibilities.
to be maybe less wasteful with the pollen grains.
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