Flowering plant

The flowering plants, also known as Angiospermae (/ˌændʒioʊˈspɜːrmiː/),[5][6] or Magnoliophyta (/mæɡˌnoʊliˈɒfɪtə, -oʊfaɪtə/),[7] are the most diverse group of land plants, with 64 orders, 416 families, approximately 13,000 known genera and 300,000 known species.

Like gymnosperms, angiosperms are seed-producing plants. They are distinguished from gymnosperms by characteristics including flowers, endosperm within their seeds, and the production of fruits that contain the seeds. Etymologically, angiosperm means a plant that produces seeds within an enclosure; in other words, a fruiting plant. The term comes from the Greek words angeion (“case” or “casing”) and sperma (seed)

The ancestors of flowering plants diverged from the common ancestor of all living gymnosperms during the Carboniferous, over 300 million years ago, with the earliest record of angiosperm pollen appearing around 134 million years ago.

The first remains of flowering plants are known from 125 million years ago. They diversified extensively during the Early Cretaceous, became widespread by 120 million years ago, and replaced conifers as the dominant trees from 60 to 100 million years ago.

The botanical term “Angiosperm”, from the Ancient Greek ἀγγεῖον, angeíon (bottle, vessel) and σπέρμα, sperma (seed), was coined in the form Angiospermae by Paul Hermann in 1690, as the name of one of his primary divisions of the plant kingdom.

This included flowering plants possessing seeds enclosed in capsules, distinguished from his Gymnospermae, or flowering plants with achenial or schizo-carpic fruits, the whole fruit or each of its pieces being here regarded as a seed and naked. Both the term and its antonym were maintained by Carl Linnaeus with the same sense, but with restricted application, in the names of the orders of his class Didynamia.

Its use with any approach to its modern scope became possible only after 1827, when Robert Brown established the existence of truly naked ovules in the Cycadeae and Coniferae,[12] and applied to them the name Gymnosperms. From that time onward, as long as these Gymnosperms were, as was usual, reckoned as dicotyledonous flowering plants, the term Angiosperm was used antithetically by botanical writers, with varying scope, as a group-name for other dicotyledonous plants.