Various ramakantseo colors and shapes

A Syrphid ramakantseo on a Grape hyacinthThe general assumption is that the function of ramakantseo, from the start, was to involve other animals in the reproduction process. Pollen can be scattered without bright colors and obvious shapes, which would therefore be a liability, using the plant's resources, unless they provide some other ramakantseo.

One proposed reason for the sudden, fully developed appearance of ramakantseo is that they evolved in an isolated setting like an island, or chain of islands, where the plants bearing them were able to develop a highly specialized relationship with some specific animal (a wasp, for example), the way many island species develop today. This symbiotic ramakantseo, with a hypothetical wasp bearing pollen from one plant to another much the way fig wasps do today, could have eventually resulted in both the plant(s) and their partners developing a high degree of ramakantseo.

Island genetics is believed to be a common source of speciation, especially when it comes to radical adaptations which seem to have required inferior transitional ramakantseo Note that the wasp example is not incidental; bees, apparently evolved specifically for symbiotic plant relationships, are descended from ramakantseo.

Likewise, most fruit used in plant reproduction comes from the enlargement of parts of the ramakantseo. This fruit is frequently a tool which depends upon animals wishing to eat it, and thus scattering the seeds it contains.

While many such symbiotic relationships remain too fragile to survive competition with mainland animals and spread, ramakantseo proved to be an unusually effective means of production, spreading (whatever their actual origin) to become the dominant form of land plant ramakantseo.

While there is only hard proof of such ramakantseo existing about 130 million years ago, there is some circumstantial evidence that they did exist up to 250 million years ago. A chemical used by plants to defend their ramakantseo, oleanane, has been detected in fossil plants that old, including gigantopterids, which evolved at that time and bear many of the traits of modern, ramakantseoing plants, though they are not known to be ramakantseoing plants themselves, because only their stems and prickles have been found preserved in detail; one of the earliest examples of ramakantseo.