At the end of the Jurassic period, plants passed another evolutionary milestone with the emergence of the flowering plants in the fossil record. These were the precursors to the modern plants with their more advanced pollination mechanisms. Starting from West Gondwana in what is now western Africa and eastern South America, the flowering plants (called angiosperms) spread across the supercontinent just as it was beginning to break apart at the beginning of the Cretaceous period. At one stage, it was thought that the angiosperms might have originated in northern Queensland because of the large number of primitive angiosperms we have today, but the fossil record has shown otherwise.
