After more than a decade of searching, scientists working in South America have found the oldest fossilized grape seeds ever found in the western Neotropics.
The location of the 60-million-year-old fossil suggests that Grapevines began to spread around the world from their origins in what is now South America shortly after. After most of the dinosaurs became extinct about 66 million years ago.
The prehistoric seed fossil was discovered in Colombia in 2022, much to the delight of paleobotanist Fabiani Herrera of the Field Museum in Chicago.
Herrera’s colleague, Monica Carvalho, was the first to find the primitive nucleus on a rock in the Andes.
“She looked at me and said, ‘Fabiani, grapes!’ And then I looked at him and said, ‘Oh my God.’ It was so exciting.” Tickets Herrera.
“I’ve been searching for the oldest grape in the Western Hemisphere since I was a college student.”
A single prehistoric grape seed may not seem very important in the grand scheme of life on Earth, but soft-tissue fruits are rarely preserved in the fossil record, and the age of the seed has varied greatly. Herrera, Carvalho and colleagues revisit the deep history of grapevines on the continent.
Today, from Mexico to Patagonia, there are nearly 100 species of grapevines, yet the fossil record of this mainly tropical family is incomplete and historically biased toward North America and Eurasia.
In 2013, scientists at the Florida Museum It was discovered Herrera discovered fossilized grape seeds in India that were about 10 million years older than those found in Europe or North America. Since then, Herrera has been searching for similar finds in the western tropics of the Americas and the Caribbean.
Along with a 60-million-year-old fossil seed left by a species researchers have named Lithova SusmaniHerrera and his team also described eight other grape seed fossils in Central and South America.
Many of the fossils have been found in what are now Panama and Peru, but they are distantly related to Old World species half a world away. These species were once thought to be restricted to Asia, but new research suggests that the seeds spread more widely and quickly around the world than scientists had expected.
In contrast, a 19-million-year-old seed from the genus Ampelokisus This species was found in Panama and is “remarkably similar” to living species in the Caribbean and Central America, suggesting that the genus originated nearby before spreading to other continents.
The reason for the appearance and spread of all these grape seeds seems to be linked to the disappearance of dinosaurs, as they did not appear in the fossil record until after their extinction.
“We always think about animals, and dinosaurs, because they were the biggest things that were affected, but the extinction event had a big impact on plants as well.” He says Herrera.
“The forest has recalibrated itself in a way that has changed the composition of plants.”
Grape vines grow well in crowded forests, where they twist and twist through the understory and canopy, clinging to other plants for support. Without dinosaurs to prune the forests, Maybe the grape plants had room to grow.
“Large animals, such as dinosaurs, are known to alter the ecosystems around them,” It is clear Carvalho.
“We think that if there were large dinosaurs roaming the forest, they were likely cutting down trees, thus keeping the forests more open than they are today.”
When our planet loses life, it doesn’t take long for something else to fill the gaps. And if Herrera and his colleagues are right, we can thank the great dinosaur exodus for allowing our species to finally domesticate tropical grapevines. About 8000 years ago.
Thanks for that!
The study was published in Nature plants.
