花朵“始祖”长啥样?像白莲花和白百合结合体_时事

花朵“始祖”长啥样?像白莲花和白百合结合体

花自古便被人类视为美的象征，世上有成千上万种花卉，但从来没人知道地球上第一朵花到底是怎样。欧洲生物学家日前用计算机模拟出世界上第一朵花的模样，看来就像白莲花和白百合的结合体。

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."