They can indicate the first welcome glimpses of springtime, set the tone on a first date, and brighten up the room when you’re sick – and it turns out that flowers have been blooming on our planet, to the benefit of all its species, for much longer than we thought.

This has been recently confirmed by research, published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by scientists at the LUH Institute of Earth System Sciences and the University of Bonn.

And as well as telling us that our prehistoric planet was blooming with colors and fragrances, their research can tell us a whole lot about Earth’s early environments, geology, and evolution too.

To truly get to grips with this, the scientists had to take their research to the most microscopic level, studying pollen grains. These grains are a tiny 0.02 millimeters, and were obtained from 100 million year old ocean sediment.

By analysing deep layers of rock under the ocean in Portugal, the researchers gained some insight into the kind of plant material that ancient rivers carried into the sea.

The pollen grains that they discovered there, using high-resolution laser scanning microscopy, helped them to understand the kinds of plants – in this case, flowering plants – that the pollen originally came from.

Then, they analyzed fossilized seashells from the same layer of sediment, in order to truly understand how old their samples were. The calcium carbonate in the seashells effectively stores the chemical composition data from the water that they once lived in.

This allowed the researchers to comprehend that these pollen grains were approximately 123 million years old.

Previously, it had been believed that the first flowering plants only emerged 121 million years ago, so this significant update in knowledge shows that flowers have bloomed on earth for two million more years than we once thought.

However, it is still thought to be the case that non-flowering plants existed much earlier than flowering plants did.

In fact, mosses and ferns emerged first, an incredible 485 to 444 million years ago. The emergence of flowering plants was hugely significant, as Bonn’s Dr Julia Gravendyck explained in a statement:

“The emergence of flowering plants altered the biological diversity considerably. But exactly where and when this development began has been an enigma that Darwin already called an ‘abominable mystery’.”

Though no one can yet say for sure when, why, or how flowers emerged, it’s heartening to know that the dinosaurs might have frolicked among the blooms.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about 50 amazing finds on Google Earth.