A lack of dinosaurs traipsing around following the K-T mass extinction may have allowed the grape we know and love to spread and thrive. A team of researchers found fossilized grape seeds dating back 60 to 19 million years old in Colombia, Panama, and Peru. The find includes the oldest known example of plants from the grape family in the Western Hemisphere and tells some parts of the grape’s evolutionary story for the first time. The grapes-for-dinosaurs exchange is detailed in a study published July 1 in the journal Nature Plants.
Usually, soft tissues like fruits are not preserved as fossils. Seeds are often how paleobotanists study ancient plants since they are more likely to fossilize. The earliest known grape seeds are roughly 66 million years old, just about when an enormous asteroid hit the Earth triggering mass extinction. […]
“Large animals, such as dinosaurs, are known to alter their surrounding ecosystems,” Mónica Carvalho, a study co-author and assistant curator at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology, said in a statement. “We think that if there were large dinosaurs roaming through the forest, they were likely knocking down trees, effectively maintaining forests more open than they are today.”
However, without hulking dinosaurs skulking about to prune them, some tropical forests–including those in modern South America–became more crowded. Layers of trees eventually formed an understory and a canopy and these new dense forests were ripe with opportunity for some plants.
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“In the fossil record, we start to see more plants that use vines to climb up trees, like grapes, around this time,” says [Fabiany Herrera, a study co-author and assistant curator of paleobotany at the Field Museum’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center.]
