| Description |
1 online resource (streaming video file) (52 min. 23 sec.) ; 315786359 bytes |
| Summary |
Flowers have long been at the centre of human life. Yet for all our love and need of flowers, until recently, the basic questions about how flowers evolved into the most important and prolific of plants have confounded scientists. In the 19th century, Charles Darwin called the dazzling variety of flowers "an abominable mystery" and the puzzle of how flowers came to make up 95 percent of all plants on earth continues today.This is a documentary that follows the controversial discovery of Archaefructus, a Chinese fossil scientists believe is the earliest evidence of a flower found on earth. The program states that when and how flowering plants began has long been one of botany's biggest and most beautiful mysteries. Could the strange new fossil Archeafructus solve that enduring mystery? The story of First Flower begins in remote northern China, where Professor Sun Ge and his team unearth the Archaefructus fossil from an ancient lake in a region where dinosaurs once roamed. Sun Ge brings his amazing find to Palaeobotanist David Dilcher at the University of Florida, who has been hunting for a fossil like this his entire like. The program explains that no one has ever found a flower fossil from the Jurassic period. Finding such a fossil was the sound equivalent of breaking the sound barrier and it led to its own kind of explosion. Flowers have always ignited passion and First Flower captures in glorious images how they are continuing to inspire new scientific discoveries today. The team's remarkable findings are contested by numerous scientists around the world, who believe their conclusions to be premature. "There are a number of problems in claiming that anything is the first flower," says Sir Peter Crane from the University of Chicago. "One is that you've got to be absolutely sure on the timing, that it is the first and that's not an easy question to resolve. Then you have to assume that what you've found is the only thing around at that time which is an absurd assumption because we know in fossil records there is more that we don't know, than what we do know."For all of these devoted botanists, the ideas in First Flower are just the beginning. "We still have a long way to go before we know the absolute truth about the roots of flowering plants," says Else Marie Friis from the Swedish Museum of Natural History. As the study of ancient fossils, rare living plants, and previously unexplored genetic structures continues, there are certain to be new revelations behind the secrets of flowers overwhelming success in the natural world |
| Event |
Broadcast 2010-06-13 at 00:00:00 |
| Notes |
Classification: G |
| Subject |
Flowers -- Morphogenesis.
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Flowers -- Reproduction.
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Plants, Flowering of.
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Plants, Fossil -- Type specimens.
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Pollination.
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China, Northwest.
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| Form |
Streaming video
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| Author |
Chase, Mark, contributor
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Crane, Peter, contributor
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Darragh, Andrew, contributor
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Dilcher, David, contributor
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Friis, Else Marie, contributor
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Ge, Sun, contributor
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Hickey, Leo, contributor
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Hinkley, Daniel J., contributor
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Kaipu, Yin, contributor
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Schreiber, Liev, cast
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Soltis, Douglas E, contributor
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Soltis, Pam, contributor
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