Cattleya rex Cattleya rex Cattleya rex is a species of epiphytic orchid of showy white flowers, native to montane forests in Peru and Bolivia. Epiphytic herb with cylindric or spindle-shaped pseudobulbs, up to 35 cm. high, with one leaf at the top. Leaf oblong or elliptic-oblong, obtuse, light green, up to 35 cm. long and up to 6 cm. wide, coriaceous. Inflorescence up to 20.3 cm. high, with 3 to 6 (or 10) flowers. Flowers large and showy, up to 17 cm wide, with sepals and petals being cream-colored or ivory white, except the lip or labellum, which is colored with yellow,
Flowering plant seed plants and later angiosperms appears to be the result of two distinct rounds of whole genome duplication events. These occurred at and . Another possible whole genome duplication event at perhaps created the ancestral line that led to all modern flowering plants. That event was studied by sequencing the genome of an ancient flowering plant, "Amborella trichopoda", and directly addresses Darwin's ""abominable mystery"." The earliest known macrofossil confidently identified as an angiosperm, "Archaefructus liaoningensis", is dated to about 125 million years BP (the Cretaceous period), whereas pollen considered to be of angiosperm origin takes the fossil record back to