[Taxacom] mangrove origin of angiosperms

[John Grehan]

That should have been "For those interested in such matters.." Mouse had a
mind of its own :)

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 2:30 AM John Grehan <calabar.john at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>