When did flowering plants appear on Earth?

For generations, scientists struggled to understand how flowering plants came to dominate Earth’s lands. These plants, known as angiosperms, exist in almost every environment and account for about 90% of all known plant life on the planet, forming vital ecosystems, habitats, and food sources.  

Last year Botanic Gardens of Sydney collaborated in a global team of 279 scientists led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, to assemble the most comprehensive angiosperm ‘Tree of Life’ ever. It used 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from over 9,500 species to unveil the history of how these plants have surpassed all other forms of plant life.

Join Dr Hervé Sauquet and Dr Hannah McPherson behind the scenes in the National Herbarium of New South Wales to learn how their teams collaborated with scientists across 27 countries. 

This extraordinary global effort provided unprecedented access to plant data dating all the way back to the late Jurassic period, which uncovered that flowering plants did indeed explode in diversity in the Early Cretaceous period – making up over 80% of the major plant lineages that exist today. 

More than 800 of species in the Tree of Life study never had their DNA sequenced before! The vast amount of data from was 15 times higher in volume than any other prior study, representing a new chapter in creating a tree of life for all 330,000 known species of flowering plants – a goal of Kew’s Tree of Life Initiative. 

The tree is now accessible to both the public and scientific community, including through the Kew Tree of Life Explorer.