The noted US-based journal Discovery rates the finding in China of the world's earliest angiosperm, or flowering plant, among the top 100 scientific news stories of 2002, according to its January issue this year.
It is also the only event covering botany/paleobotany selected from among the year's 100 prominent news stories that include more than 10 fields of scientific research.
The landmark finding of the earliest angiosperm was jointly made by experts from the Paleontology Center at prestigious Jilin University in northeast China and the Natural Museum of the University of Florida.
The news first appeared in the May 2002 issue of the influential US journal Science, which announced prominently that a fossilized plant with well-preserved stems, leaves, flowers and fruit found in northeast China's Liaoning Province, was believed to be the earliest and most complete flowering plant yet discovered on the planet.
Angiosperms are the most developed plants and critical to human life today. There are over 300,000 species of angiosperms belonging to about 400 families in the modern world.
The origin of angiosperms has been hotly debated for the past 150 years. Eminent British naturalist Charles Darwin was unsure when and where the first flowering plants appeared.
The finding of the 57-cm-high plant fossil led experts to be convinced that the world's earliest flowers may have bloomed in China about 140 million years ago.
(Xinhua News Agency January 10, 2003)
