File:Daisy Chain Hippie.jpg

In memory of Joan and daisy chains...

Daisies in USC Alumni Park

The first daisies may have flourished while dinosaurs still walked the Earth, researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Evidence from tiny grains of fossilized pollen suggests that the Asteraceae flower family, which includes daisies, chrysanthemums and sunflowers, is 20 million years older than previously suspected, writes Jonathan Tilley for HortWeek.

• https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/08/05/1423653112

The flowering plant family Asteraceae (e.g. sunflowers, daisies, chrysanthemums), with about 23,000 species, is found almost everywhere in the world except in Antarctica.

Asteraceae (or Compositae) are regarded as one of the most influential families in the diversification and evolution of a large number of animals that heavily depends on their inflorescences to survive (e.g. bees, hummingbirds, wasps). Here we report the discovery of pollen grains unambiguously assigned to Asteraceae that remained buried in Antarctic deposits for more than 65 million years along with other extinct groups (e.g. Dinosaurs, Ammonites). Our discovery drastically pushes back the assumed origin of Asteraceae, because these pollen grains are the oldest fossils ever found for the family.