Flowerless Fruit?

Question

Fruit appear on the fossil record before flowers. Are there still any plants that produce fruit, and no flower?

There was a question similar to this earlier, but the consensus was that there could not be fruit without flowers. Since I was under the impression that Flowering Plants are only more recent in the fossil record, while fruit dates back further, are there still any plants that make fruit and not flowers?

Answer 1

There is no record of the flowerless fruit bearing plant.  Flowers of the fossilised fruits may be too tiny to identify them in the fossils.

Answer 2

Fruit will never grow without having a flower first. When flower is fertilized, it matures to fruit, where the seed is stored.

I don't think that's possibe.

Answer 3

i don't know any such flowerless fruit...................

Answer 4

Gymnosperms plants have male & female cone but they are not flower like.

Some angiosperms have fruit like inflorescence eg. Pipal (Ficus reliogosa ), Fig.

Answer 5

As far as I am aware, there are no non-flowering fruit-bearing plants. I would also argue that there probably never were.

You need to be careful when drawing conclusions from incomplete bodies of data like the fossil record. Just because we have a fossils of fruit that are older than fossils of flowers, doesn't necessarily mean that these fruit came from non-flowering plants. It may just be that the flowers from that period didn't get made into fossils so we have no record of them. This makes sense since flowers tend to rot very quickly while fruit can take much longer.

Hope this helps.

TV

EDIT: In response to the questioner's edit. No, I don't think that it was that way in the past either. As pointed out below, fruit is actually the product of a pollinated flower and grows from a part of the flower itself (the ovule). Next time you eat an apple, flip it upside down and look at the end of the core. That brownish dried up mess in the centre is the remnants of the flower itself.