THIS brush-shaped fossil is the oldest known member of the daisy or sunflower family. Its colour and texture capture something of the feel of Vincent van Gogh’s famous paintings of the dying sunflowers, which were built up from thick ochre-coloured brushstrokes invoking the texture of petals and seed heads.
The sunflower is distinctive and unusual because what appears to be a single flower actually is a composite of numerous, simple flowers of varied shapes that are grouped together at the end of a stem, collectively acting as a single integrated entity. This compound flowerhead gives the family its name Compositae and also its alternative name Asteraceae, which comes from the classical Latin word aster, meaning ‘star’. Nearly 10% of the flowers in the world today belong to this family. With 27,400 species, the Asteraceae is second only to the orchids in size, yet measured against the long history of plant evolution, the rise of the sunflowers is a comparatively late phenomenon.
The Asteraceae are thought to originate in southern South America about 70 million years ago, close to the dawn of the Cenozoic Era. In this small corner of the world the new young family survived the catastrophic environmental change that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the earliest stages of their evolution would have taken place in the immediate aftermath, as ecosystems began to recover. Some 20 million years later their numbers and diversity had grown, and they dispersed across the ever-widening southern Atlantic Ocean to Africa, and from there onwards to Europe and Asia, arriving in North America some 30 million years ago.
Denne historien er fra July 15, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra July 15, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
