[Taxacom] mangrove origin of angiosperms

[John Grehan]

For those in such matters, below a little excerpt from Croizat 1968 163)
concerning the general principle that ancestral angiosperms were part of
the mangrove environment - the region between land and sea but not of
either:

 A very large part, possibly the overwhelming part of the history of
angiospermous development, has been written starting with vegetation of the
strand, that is, with mangroves and near mangroves. Theoreticians in
palaeontology turned phytogeographers and evolutionists do today insist, in
the United States and Russia alike, that the original angiosperms were
plants of the heights, intending thus to explain – of course, on strictly
technical grounds – why we have no fossils of them. This palaeontological
day-dreaming forgets that life of the heights is very generally derived
from life of the plains; that a flora adapted to the heights is much sooner
likely to disappear than to thrive when pushed toward lower grounds (1);
that the shore and its hinterland furnish the best possible background for
“adaptation” in different directions, not only, but for rapid, quite
diffusive spread. In sum, the success of angiospermy rested upon a great
deal of plasticy served, of course, by an environment of the ubiquitous
kind. To do what they did in the run of some 50-75 million years only,
covering the earth from pole to pole after a timid beginning in the
southern continents, the earliest angiosperms could be nothing if not
aggressive weeds in the classic meaning (Space 220) of the term.