An international research team led by the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology has found new evidence of the world's earliest fossil flower from specimens unearthed in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, dating the origin of flowering plants to 174 million years ago, or the Early Jurassic. The study authors named it Nanjinganthus dendrostyla, according to new research in the open-access journal eLife.

The research team has studied 264 specimens of 198 individual flowers preserved on 34 slabs from the South Xiangshan Formation – an outcrop of rocks in the Nanjing region renowned for bearing fossils from the Early Jurassic epoch. This kind of Nanjing flower has four to five petals and looks like a modern plum blossom.

This discovery reshapes the current understanding of the evolution of flowers. The flowering plants were thought to have a history of fewer than 130 million years, however, this updated research suggests that they existed 50 million years earlier than that, in the Early Jurassic. The Early Jurassic is known as the period that saw dinosaurs dominating the planet.