Here's how plants became meat eaters
About 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, a genetic anomaly allowed some plants to turn into meat eaters. This was done in part, with a stealthy trick: repurposing genes meant for their roots and leaves and using them instead to catch prey, a new study finds.
This step is one of three that some non-carnivorous plants took over tens of millions of years to allow them to turn into hungry carnivores, the researchers said.
The meat-eating shift gave these plants a number of advantages. In effect, "carnivorous plants have turned the tables by capturing and consuming nutrient-rich animal prey, enabling them to thrive in nutrient-poor soil," the researchers wrote in the study, published online May 14 in the journal Current Biology.
To investigate how carnivorous plants evolved, an international team of botanists and biologists led by Jörg Schultz, Associate Professor, at the University of Würzburg, Germany, compared the genomes and anatomy of three modern meat-eating plants.
https://www.livescience.com/how-carnivorous-plants-evolved.html