What about the bennettitaleans? Were their "flower-like structures" true flower analogs with colors and pollinators, or were they just bogus petals
huh….never heard of these before (i know the most about devonian plants) but just from doing some surface-level sifting through ScienceDirect it looks like…the jury’s still out on that. like it seems like the general consensus is that the structures themselves are kind of in the middle and could go either way towards flower or not-flower, and most articles are referring to them as just gymnosperms wilding out in the Jurassic as opposed to like, ‘real’ flowers as we know them today, but the same articles seem to disagree on:
1. are these ancestors to modern flowering plants, or is this just an example of convergent evolution?
2. if they are ancestors to modern flowering plants, how are they related and what does this mean??
now, as for POLLINATORS, that’s a whole different story. admittedly i don’t know much about that, either, but i DID come across a cool 2010 article including bennettitaleans in a really comprehensive graphic of hypothesized early seed plant pollinator types:
(higher resolution here)
the (slightly shortened) diagram description:
FIGURE 1: The distribution of pollination modes in seed plants, emphasizing Mesozoic lineages, shown as thick, vertical, colored bars linked to pollination modes at lower right. Seed plant lineages document 51 feeding association occurrences documented by smaller horizontal bars, defined in the center-right legend and keyed to the 20 (and other) fossil localities at left. Assignment of pollination modes is based on evidence from fossil fructification structure, pollen size and surface features, and modern determinations from surviving lineages, including pollination drop nutritional status and especially numerous studies of the pollinators of basal angiosperm lineages (also see Fig. 2). Each lineage column provides the dominant pollination mode, up to the three most common modes. Lineages with dashed segments indicate inferred presence, often occurring around major extinction events. Small horizontal bars within the lineage columns indicate fossil evidence for pollen, nectar, or both, presented for insect consumption. Note the presence of the early phase of the angiosperm radiation, indicated by a horizontal band from 130 to 90 Ma. These data are not exhaustive and spotlight Mesozoic associations, defined by the lower P-Tr and upper K-Pg extinction events; the Late Paleozoic and Cenozoic are de-emphasized.
in this diagram, the authors attribute bennettitalean pollination to adult beetles/internal larvae and small non-proboscid insects. thinking about how modern cycads are pollinated (by wind and, more widely, by beetles), this makes some sense, although you know…modern cycads don’t have weird pseudo-flowers going on.
