Nearly 2 billion dollars will be spent this week on flowers to celebrate St. Valentine's Day. This is a Sabot de Venus, a #carnivorous #orchid that traps bees and flies in its nectar. The story of the evolution of flowers is a fascinating one. Several groups of #extinct gymnosperms, particularly seed ferns, have been proposed as the ancestors of flowering plants but there is no continuous fossil evidence showing exactly how flowers evolved. The apparently sudden appearance of relatively modern flowers in the fossil record posed such a problem for the theory of evolution that it was called an "abominable mystery" by Charles #Darwin. Recently discovered angiosperm fossils such as Archaefructus, along with further discoveries of fossil gymnosperms, suggest how angiosperm characteristics may have been acquired in a series of steps. I photographed this flower @KewGardens for a story about #CharlesDarwin for the @natgeo "Was Darwin Wrong? (no, by the way). @robertclarkphoto @thephotosociety @instituteartist
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