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This is the story of how a flower, the wild daisy, has lived and survived the creation of the continents on our planet. And it has survived to this day to shine again this spring, as we see in The Photos of the Readers of La Vanguardia.
The continent of Gondwana was named by the Austrian scientist Eduard Suess (1831-1914) after a region of northern India, Gond (gondwana, in Sanskrit, means Gond forest). He referred to Gondwána-Land in his book The Faces of the Earth (Das Antlitz der Erde), published between 1883 and 1901. Some scientists refer to Gondwanaland.
This ancient land on our planet had also previously fascinated, from a geological point of view, the Irish botanist, geologist and archaeologist Henry Benedict Medlicott.
Be that as it may, Gondwana was a large southern continental block that existed since the Neoproterozoic (about 550 million years ago). It is estimated that about 270 million years ago, Gondwana collided with the continents of Laurentia, Baltica and Siberia to form a supercontinent known as Pangea.
Gondwana began to split during the Jurassic (about 180 million years ago) and the Cretaceous, with the opening of the Drake Passage, which separated South America and Antarctica during the Eocene. The splitting of Pangea in two extended the Tethys Sea westward, separating it from Laurasia, during the Jurassic.
The process gave rise to the continental masses of present-day South America, Africa, Australia, Zealandia, Hindustan, the island of Madagascar and Antarctica, a process of partition and distancing that continued during the Cenozoic and remains active today.
And what role does the daisy play in all this? Well, it turns out that a team of scientists found near the Argentine tourist city of Bariloche, in Argentine Patagonia, a 47 million-year-old fossil that shed light on the origins of sunflowers and daisies. The research was carried out at the Bernardino Rivadavia Museum of Natural Sciences.
That is, we were looking at the oldest daisy. The fossil was from the Asteraceae family (it also includes other flowers such as sunflower, dandelion and chrysanthemum, as well as lettuce, artichoke, chicory, tarragon and 23,000 other wild species).
And the fact is that this flower, very well preserved as a fossil, confirmed that it came from the ancient Gondwana land mass, from about 50 million years ago.
Back in the 21st century, the rains of this past Holy Week have favored the germination of wild daisies on the grass of the cloister of the Pedralbes monastery in Barcelona. In this series of photographs, I have interpreted them with colored reflections, like a burst of spring beauty.
