Was there a butterfly first, or a flower?

Flowers provide nectar to insects such as butterflies, and insects such as butterflies help pollinate flowers. So here's the question: on Earth, did flowers or butterflies come first?

At one time, most scientists believed that flowers predated the earliest pollinators and that insects like butterflies and moths came with flowers. However, new research suggests that primitive butterflies existed long before the first flowering plants appeared on Earth.

Did butterflies or flowers come first? How do scientists know?

To know whether there were butterflies or flowers first, we need to know who appeared on Earth first, the first butterfly or the first flower, and the most common way is, to find fossils.

However, flowers are fragile structures that are difficult to preserve, and only in the most fortunate cases do they form fossils. The oldest flower fossil that has been discovered is that of an aquatic plant found in Spain, 130 million years old.

The development of molecular biology has brought scientists to understand the evolution of flowers. Combining molecular phylogeny and macro-fossil evidence, scientists collected data on 63 orders, 372 families, 793 plant species, and 13,444 characters to reconstruct the ancestral flower of angiosperm phylogeny based on a model, which was found to date back to 140 million years ago.

Butterflies and moths belong taxonomic ally to the order TelePrompter and are most notably characterized by scales covering their bodies and wings and possessing siphoning mouth parts - long beaks that facilitate nectar sucking. Like flowers, insects like butterflies and moths are difficult to leave behind as fossils, and complete fossils available for study are rare, but scientists have found a breakthrough.

In 2012, a team of paleontology researchers working on spores and pollen found unexplained tiny structures in organic sediments while searching for ancient leaf litter and sediments. The researchers eventually discovered that the tiny structures were the remains of primitive interoperable wings.

According to phenomenological analyses, the sedimentary layers where these remains occur were formed during the Triassic-Jurassic transition, about 200 million years ago. This means that TelePrompter appeared on Earth at least 200 million years ago, whereas flowering plants started to grow on land only 140 million years ago, long before flowering plants, i.e. angiosperms, appeared 60 million years ago, and primitive butterflies and moths were already present.

What did these primitive butterflies eat before flowers appeared?

Before the discovery of fossilized wings of primitive TelePrompter, the common view among scientists was that the appearance of mouth parts of insects such as butterflies and moths occurred as an evolutionary adaptation to sucking nectar from flowers. But if butterflies and moths with mouthparts emerged before flowering plants, what did they feed on? And what caused them to start surviving by sucking nectar?

Considering that the weather on Earth at that time was much hotter and drier than now and that insects such as butterflies and moths had a relatively large body surface area and easily lost water in their bodies, one of the scientists' guesses is that to adapt to the hot and dry climate at that time, primitive insects evolved siphoning beaks to facilitate the effective intake of liquids and replenish the rapidly losing water. In other words, the beaks of early butterflies and moths were used to "drink".

Initially, they probably survived by sucking water droplets and exudate from broken leaves and tree trunks. To this day, there are a few butterflies that retain this primitive characteristic. For example, the dead leaf nymph and the glaucous nymph feed primarily on sap from rotting fruit or insect-infested wounds in leaf trunks.

Dead Leaf Nymphs

After the emergence of gymnosperms, primitive butterflies and moths followed the discovery of pollen droplets, a highly nutritious fluid secreted by immature seeds of naked plants such as primitive pines and cypresses. Pollen droplets contain a variety of sugars, including fructose, glucose, and sucrose, and butterflies soon came to enjoy the sweetness of the nutrient-rich pollen droplets.

After the emergence of flowering plants, the insects are attracted to the nectar and help pollinate the flowers while feeding on it, and the two sides eventually form a mutually beneficial relationship and evolve together.

A final caveat is that while the current definitive evidence suggests that flowers have only existed for as long as 140 million years, some environmental evidence suggests that they may have existed for much longer. After all, we cannot go back to the time when flowering plants began to appear, and the only way to understand the origin of angiosperms is through fossils or the molecular techniques available.

Perhaps, in the future, we will be lucky enough to discover new fossil evidence. Or, as technology continues to develop, we may discover flowering plants that have been around longer, and the relationship between flowering plants and insects will be redefined.

Isn't that how science repeats itself, discovering, proving, and disproving?