Flowering plants diversified earlier than we thought, and dinosaurs may have snacked on them

“These fossils change how we understand the way flowering plants became modern in terms of their reproductive ecology.” Modern flowering plants, by contrast, use a much wider variety of dispersal strategies. That may not sound especially large today, but it is remarkably large for flowering plants of that period.” The new research challenges one longstanding idea that large fruits evolved alongside the rapid diversification of mammals only after the asteroid impact eliminated the dinosaurs. “As mammals expanded into newly available ecological niches, flowering plants were thought to have diversified their seed dispersal strategies in response,” the KU researcher added.