花朵的祖先像白莲花和白百合结合体_BEC初级作文

花朵的祖先像白莲花和白百合结合体

Dr Jason Hilton from the University of Birmingham, UK, who was not involved in the study, said: "The structure and organization of the ancestral flower has remained enigmatic. For instance, we don't know if the oldest flowers were unisexual or bisexual, or if they were pollinated by wind or insects."

英国伯明翰大学的杰森•希尔顿博士没有参加这项研究，他称：“鲜花始祖的结构和组织依然还是个谜。例如，我们不知道最古老的花朵是单性的还是双性的，或是依靠风还是昆虫授粉。”

To reconstruct the appearance of the first flower, the scientists recorded the features - such as the petals and sepals - of the flowers from 792 living species.

为了重现世上第一朵鲜花的外观，科学家记录了792种现存花卉的花瓣、萼片等外形特征。

They mapped the distribution of these features on to the evolutionary tree of flowering plants enabling them to build a picture of what flowers looked like at key points in their history - including the last common ancestor of all living flowers.

他们将这些特征分布绘制成开花植物的进化树，从而重现花卉在关键的进化节点上的样貌，其中就包括所有现存花卉的最后一个共同祖先的样子。

The first flower is reconstructed with petal-like structures arranged in a whorl, so each petal appears in the same plane, like a common lily (but with more whorls), rather than in a spiral, where petals overlap in a spiral arrangement around the stem, like a lotus.