Sex, drugs, and paleo-botany!

A few hundred years ago a new fad swept through the privileged ranks of the old world. It was a substance refined from an enigmatic plant brought back from the New World. Hailed as a godsend by some, more recent experience has shown that long-term consumption can lead to erratic behavior, serious weight fluctuations, and systemic organ failure. Even first-time users can, although rarely, fall victim to fatal cardiopulmonary shock. But it is not all bad. I must confess, on my first date with the future Mrs., she and I both indulged. The mysterious extract soon worked its neurotransmitter magic. We gazed enraptured into each others now-blazing eyes, and fell madly in love.

If you travel back to the opening days of the Cretaceous, you'd be well advised to watch your step. Saurian monsters abound. Hungry eyes watch from ambush. Hordes of tiny rat-like mammals slumber by day in fur lined burrows, emerging to feed at dusk. With so much to worry about, it is easy to miss the most important new organism to arise in ages, standing low in the tangled bank at the steamy water's edge. The first little flowers were unobtrusive in a world ruled by carnivorous monsters.

Botanists classify so-called higher plants into two main groups: angiosperms and gymnosperms. Both produce seeds. However, the seeds of angiosperms are surrounded by a fleshy vessel, or an angio in Latin, forming an often tasty wrapper. The seeds of gymnosperms lack an equivalent structure and thus are 'naked', or gymno. The origin of flowering plants is a hotly debated topic. Some feel there is indirect evidence for a possible ancestor over 200 million years ago. But the oldest unambiguous fossil evidence for a flowering plant is found in China, roughly 125 million years ago, shown right courtesy of Odyssey Magazine.

Regardless of when they first evolved, the new plants had hit on an ingenious survival strategy. Rather than playing an inadvertent role in the mandibles, jaws, and gullets of ancient insects, they created a sort of organic peace offering, free for the taking. Pollen and sweet nectar were at first the animal payoff for cross-fertilizing the new angiosperms. The blooms even developed secret patterns invisible to the eyes of vertebrates, but flashing rings and other enticing patterns in ultraviolet wavelengths to wave in their insect couriers.

After dinosaurs disappeared some 65 million years ago, flowering plants refined their next smash hits: fruits and grain. The animals eat the fleshy prize; the seeds are safely transported far and wide and then deposited in a steaming pile of rich animal fertilizer. Liliopsida, better known as grass, appears widely in the fossil record in the Eocene. By 30 million years ago, grasses dominated the flat savannas and meadows, and provided food for the largest mammals ever to walk the earth.

Over the next 25 million years, a few of these hardy flowering grasses evolved into the forerunners of wheat, corn, and rice. Nowadays, those three grains account for half the calories in the global human diet. A whopping five trillion calories of cereal grains are consumed by people everyday, and two trillion more in the form of sugar, tubers, veggies, and other foodstuffs made from flowering plants. Added to that, every pound of meat we eat conservatively represents thousands of calories of commercial cereals and wild grasses. And even with the sweet fruits and toothsome grains they offer, artificial selection was required, operating over millennia on hundreds of angiosperm species, so that humans can reap the great modern harvest.

Of course, the plants could never fully trust their new animal partners. Given half a chance, the animals would gobble down the whole plant; fruit, nut, flower, stem, and root. It didn't take long for evolution to produce critters that would do exactly that. The plants responded by incorporating substances that would leave the offending critter with a stomach ache, or worse, if it ate the wrong part at the wrong time. Many of our modern drugs come from such defenses. Quinine from tree bark, caffeine from the coffee bean, narcotic painkillers from the opium poppy, and aspirin from the willow tree. These substances don't pose quite as much danger to us as they do to insects and their ilk. In fact, for humans, the effects of some of those natural insecticides are downright addictive.

Which brings us back to that first date with my lovely Valentine, and the highly habit-forming, brain altering substance we ingested at the dawn of the new millennium. The source was a flowering plant, the substance it produces is sublime. Yet we broke no draconian drug laws. Our inaugural treat was first used thousands of years ago, in a crude form, by Native Americans in what is now called Central America. The Aztecs called it Xo-co-latl. But we know it today as Chocolate.

Flowers; they not just for Valentine's Day, we depend on them all year round, but they're nice then, too.