Botanists now have a new clue to that mystery.
A diminutive tree with button-sized flowers, rediscovered on a remote ridge top in Madagascar, has been identified as the descendant of one of the first flowering plants. The rain forest plant has a history of reappearing unexpectedly. It belongs to a family of tropical plants, Winteraceae, that today is common on Pacific islands and can also be found in Central and South America. Yet records of fossilized pollen indicate that the plant became extinct in Africa 30 million years ago. In 1963, a French botanist found an unidentified museum specimen that had been collected from the island of Madagascar, off the coast of Africa, in 1909.