Barremian Stage

What happened during this time?

• Earliest definitive angiosperm fossil leaves and flowers (i.e. Montsechia and Archaefructus)

  • Angiosperms appear in low numbers confined to stream or lake-margin habitats at low latitudes

• An early aquatic flowering plant, Montsechia vidalii, has been found from Spain during the earliest Barremian (Gomez et al. 2015)

  • Montsechia possessed no obvious flower parts, such as petals or nectar-producing structures for attracting insects

  • This plant was probably water-pollinated, which is rare among living angiosperms

  • The fruit contains a single seed, which is borne upside down.

  • Montsechia is possibly related to the living Ceratophyllum

• Some researchers have proposed that "...most evidence suggests insect pollination is ancestral in angiosperms" (Stephens et al. 2023)

  • The pollination features in Montsechia and Archaefructus along with ancestral living angiosperms that have wind-pollination, such as Trithuria submersa (Taylor et al., 2010), or are ambophilous, such as Amborella trichopoda (Thien et al., 2003) seems to contrast with this conclusion

• Tricolpate pollen from the late Barremian of England (Hughes and McDougall 1990) and Africa (Doyle et al. 1977; Doyle 1992).