A group of living things
Flowering plants
Angiospermae
Flowers that hired animal couriers and took over the world.
Its members' last common ancestor lived about 140 million years ago.
You and flowering plants last shared an ancestor about 1.8 billion years ago (on 28 July, if life's history were one year).
Flowers and fruit turned animals into couriers, and that deal helped flowering plants take over the planet. They now shape most green land, except where conifer forests hold on. Close relatives outside this group include the giant sequoia. While cones carry naked seeds, flowering plants lock their seeds inside a closed case that ripens into fruit.
A typical flower mixes pollen-making stamens with seed-making carpels, often dressed with bright petals and usually green sepals below. About four in five kinds depend on animals to carry pollen, from bees and butterflies to birds and nectar-feeding bats. Fruits keep travelling too, with wings for wind, barbs for fur, or fleshy fruit for animals that swallow the seeds and drop them later.
This one group stretches from duckweed grains a few millimetres across to mountain ash about 100 metres tall, about as tall as a 30-storey tower. Members live from rainforest and desert to ponds and roadsides. Oaks are flowering plants too, even when their tiny flowers do not look flowery.
Huge group
There are more than 300,000 known kinds, making them the most varied plants on Earth.
Three crops feed us
Maize, rice and wheat alone give people about 40 per cent of food energy and over one-third of protein.
Two survive Antarctica
Only two native kinds grow on Antarctica, Antarctic hair grass and Antarctic pearlwort, forming low clumps no taller than about 5 centimetres.