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When Did Nature Burst into Vivid Color?
Scientists reconstructed 500 million years of evolutionary history to reveal which came first: colorful signals or the color vision needed to see them.
Apples blush red to coax animals to spread their seeds, lavender blooms are violet to lure in pollinating bees, and male peacocks trailed by flashy blue trains more successfully attract mates. The pair scoured the literature to compile fossils and phylogenetic trees, built by themselves and others, to put rough dates on when these traits might have emerged in deep time. While, phylogenetically, colorful flowers seem to have a single origin, the warning hues are present in nine different phyla, which means they likely evolved independently again and again — maybe even hundreds of times, Wiens said.
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