All living flowers ultimately derive from a single ancestor that lived about 140 million years ago, a study suggests.

一项研究表明，地球上现存的所有花卉都起源于1.4亿年前的同一个“祖先”。

Scientists combined models of flower evolution with the largest data set of features from living flowers ever assembled.

科学家将花卉演化的模型与最大的现存鲜花的特征数据集组合在一起。

From this the team was able to infer the appearance of the ancestral flower.

该研究团队据此推测出鲜花始祖的样貌。

The flower had many concentric cycles of petal-like organs in sets of three, arranged in whorls, and was bisexual.

这种鲜花雌雄同体，花瓣以同心圆方式环绕成多层，每层三片，层层呈齿轮状分布。

Hervé Sauquet, from Université Paris-Sud, France, one of the authors of the paper published last week in Nature Communications said: "There is no living flower that looks exactly like the ancestral one. This is a flower that existed at least 140 million years ago and has had considerable time to evolve into the incredible diversity of flowers that exist today."

《自然通讯》上周刊载了这篇论文。法国巴黎第十一大学的埃尔韦•索凯是论文的作者之一。他说，“现存的所有花朵都与它们的祖先不同，原因在于鲜花始祖存在于至少1.4亿年前，经过了相当长的时间才演变出今天的多样性。”

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