Best to contextualize this with the knowledge that the initial transition towards pastoralism and agriculture (ie the Neolithic) brought a major negative impact to overall human skeletal health.

There are hundreds of studies examining this question and generally coming to the same consensus, but here’s a couple more narrative and less jargony ones.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4466732/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21507735/

The overall takeaway is that agriculture resulted in a severe downturn for human health, but renders out to a net contribution to fitness because of massive increases in ovulation. Women even in extant hunter-gatherer populations experience a total number of ovulatory cycles somewhere around an order of magnetite less than women in agriculture societies, even in what we would today call “developing” conditions, or in older research is sometimes called “third world” or “unindustrialized”.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4602928

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4602772

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1524031113

From the third citation:

> We examine the effects of sedentarization and cultivation on disease load, mortality, and fertility among Agta foragers. We report increased disease and mortality rates associated with sedentarization alongside an even larger increase in fertility associated with both participation in cultivation and sedentarization. Thus, mothers who transition to agriculture have higher reproductive fitness. We provide the first empirical evidence, to our knowledge, of an adaptive mechanism behind the expansion of agriculture, explaining how we can reconcile the Neolithic increase in morbidity and mortality with the observed demographic expansion.

There is no precise physiological answer as to why, so if someone says they know, they’re either lying or not well-read enough. Agriculture means lots of carbohydrates, and insulin has major effects on sex steroid balancing via its modulation of aromatase, so that is probably a contributor. The massive decrease in population mobility also means a less energy-stressed environment, which is a potent suppressor of ovulation, and also of lactation. Lactation itself also suppresses ovulation, and breastfeeding duration is markedly longer in extant non-agricultural populations, though these groups tend to be somewhat hybridized and not nearly as mobile as their (and our) Paleolithic ancestors, so they should not be taken as a perfect model for those extinct groups.

ideally we wouldn't have large surface car parks in cities... but I guess if they're going to exist using them for solar makes it slightly better?

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The surprise isn’t that an ancestor of those living plants was alive at that time, as that would be basically tautological: every living thing has at least one ancestor alive for every single moment in time, all the way back to the very origin of life on this planet.

The surprise is the morphology of this plant being dated so far back. Flowering plants as a whole (ie as a monophyletic group going back to a singular, morphologically similar ancestor) were thought to have arisen long after this, and a specimen being dated c 80mya with complex flowers means the onramp of development of this anatomy goes back much further.

This will certainly result in some cladistic musical chairs if the dating is accurate, and a bunch of botany students will have yet another outdated section in their textbooks. Some of us in evo joke that every time a plant is tossed somewhere else on the phylogenetic tree, somewhere a botanist takes a shot of tequila and cries.

Source: not a botanist but I do fight them over parking spots

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I'm interested in whether these milk gainz are transmissible to offspring.

US carbon emissions, measured by both consumption and production, peaked in 2005 and have been trending downwards since and are 20% lower than their peak.

No wayyyyyyy clearly you and the scientists must be wrong. This clearly is too obvious.

If you excuse me, so now need to go shave.

Redacted, because I’m an idiot.

Yes those plants are the precursors of the actual plants, they “survived” to the dinosaurs extinction and they evolved in the coffee, tomatoes, etc…

So, you are saying that carbon emissions into the atmosphere are already slowing down? Last I checked, they were still accelerating.

Carbon trends in different economies.

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Yeah, what evidence?

Evidence suggests exactly the opposite.

Densify, densify, densify.

There's also the point that we have too much parking, and this might help get rid of some of it.

I read the article and it still isn't clear to me. This is a precursor to those plants mentioned in your title? It's not like Utah raptors were making ketchup and smoking tabacco

And recycling is the last on the list for a reason. Only to be done when your efforts to reduce waste and reuse/repurpose said items are exhausted.

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It is something they had better keep an eye on, given that we keep accelerating global warming by putting out ever more greenhouse gases. Either that, or the people should move now before some of these break.

I think I would want to sell now, while the prices are still high, and move elsewhere, rather than end up in a news article about how one of these "unexpectedly" breaks in a few years.

People are dismissive of sustainability are capitalists who use fear to crack the whip on their employees. All capitalists are terrorists.

But if we do not phase out capitalism, we are on the trolley track to human extinction.