Emily Chan
After dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago, grapes spread around the world. Their extinction may have enabled the fruit to expand its range.
Recently, a group of scientists discovered nine new species of fossil grapes from Panama, Peru, and Colombia.
The remains, which consist of preserved seeds, provide insight into how plants from the grape family, Vitaceae, were distributed following the demise of the dinosaurs.
The nine new species date between 60 and 19 million years ago. One of the species, from the Andes of Colombia, is the earliest known example of plants from the grape family in the Western Hemisphere.
“These are the oldest grapes ever found in this part of the world, and they’re a few million years younger than the oldest ones ever found on the other side of the planet,” Fabiany Herrera, the lead author of the study and an assistant curator of paleobotany at the Field Museum in Chicago’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center, said.
The age of the fossils corresponds with the timing of the mass extinction event that wiped out most of Earth’s plant and animal species, including all non-avian dinosaurs.
The extinction event has long been thought to be caused by a giant asteroid that struck the Earth, making conditions on the planet unlivable.
The sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs had an enormous impact on plants, an idea that may not have been explored in depth until now.
“Large animals, such as dinosaurs, were known to alter their surrounding ecosystems. 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,” said Mónica Carvalho, a co-author of the study and an assistant curator from the Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan.
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