North America's oldest flowering plant discovered inside a museum

The oldest flowering plant in North America may have been discovered in a fossil collection at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Nathan Jud, a PhD student at the University of Maryland, was examining ancient plant fossils at the museum when he discovered Potomacapnos apeleutheron, a flowering fern whose fossil is thought to be between 115 and 125 million years old. While there is nothing unusual about a flowering fern today, it was a relatively rare sight during the Early Cretaceous period. The plant's distinctive pollen structure marked it as a eudicot, a group that now includes about 70 percent of the world's flowering plants.

via Tech News Headlines - Yahoo! News http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/30/5158814/north-americas-oldest-flowering-plant-discovered-inside-a-museum