With the advent of some new techniques, the past several years have been a time of fascinating discoveries on the origin and early evolution of angiosperms. Rapidly accumulating data have resulted in notable progress, and this field is becoming an active and exciting branch of botany. The paper, first, reviews the studies on early angiosperm evolution in the last fifty years; then discusses recent advances that have been made since early 1980s from five aspects, i.e., molecular systematics, cladistics, micromorphology of flowers under scanning electron microscopy, molecular genetics of floral development and the Cretaceous fossil flowers and other reproductive structures; finally, several future directions of the field are briefly discussed.