Suddenly we have flowers

140 million years ago was when the ancestors of most (more than 99 per cent) flowering plants suddenly appeared on the planet. The evolutionary event took a mere few million years. This is blink in geological time.

From the New Scientist web site, we get this information:
Earlier research had failed to identify the relationships between the major groups of flowering plants, apart from showing that water lilies, a rare shrub called Amborella from New Caledonia, and a handful of other plants were the first to split from the main line of flowering plants. Now Mike Moore at Oberlin College in Ohio and colleagues have gone further.

The team sequenced entire chloroplast genomes for 45 flower species from all major groups, which revealed that five sister groups split off nearly simultaneously. Two groups, the eudicots (including roses, sunflowers and tomatoes) and the monocots (grasses and their relatives), together account for 95 per cent of flowering plants. Magnolias occupy a third group. The two others are less well known

What caused the explosive divergence remains a mystery, although large water-transport tubes may have played a part. Moore notes that the five groups are the only plants with this adaptation.

Okay that's the end of the quote from the New Scientist article. The really mysterious part, though, is not the "explosive divergence." The really mysterious part is that nobody draws a lesson from such events about the limits of human thought.