After more than a decade of searching, scientists working in South America have stumbled upon the oldest grape seed fossil ever found in the Western Neotropics.
The location of the tiny 60-million-year-old fossil suggests that: The grapevine originated in what is now South America and soon began to spread throughout the world. Since most dinosaurs became extinct approximately 66 million years ago.
The fossilized prehistoric seed 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 discover the primitive seeds in the rocks of the Andes.
“She looked at me and said, ‘Fabiani, grapes!’ And I looked at it and thought, ‘Oh my god.’ I was really excited.” Recall Herrera.
“I’ve been searching for the oldest grapes in the Western Hemisphere since my college days.”
In the grand scheme of life on Earth, a single prehistoric grape seed may not seem all that significant, but soft fruits are rarely preserved in the fossil record, and the age of the seed is Herrera, Carvalho and their colleagues are rethinking the continent’s long history of vines.
Although about 100 species of grapevines are known today from Mexico to Patagonia, the fossil record of this primarily tropical plant is fragmentary and historically concentrated in North America and Eurasia.
In 2013, scientists at the Florida Museum Discover The fossil grape seeds found in India are nearly 10 million years older than those found in Europe or North America. Herrera has since been searching for similar finds in the western Neotropics of the Americas and the Caribbean.
With 60 million-year-old fossil seeds left behind by the species researchers named. Lituba SusmaniHerrera and his team also described eight other grape seed fossils from Central and South America.
Some fossils have been found in what is now Panama and Peru, but they are distantly related to Old World genera on the other side of the globe. The genus was once thought to be confined to Asia, but new research suggests that its seeds may have spread farther and faster around the world than scientists had expected.
In contrast, the 19 million-year-old inner seed Ampelocisus It was discovered in Panama and is “very similar” to species found in the Caribbean and Central America, suggesting the genus originated nearby before spreading to other continents.
The reason for the appearance and spread of all these grape seeds seems to be related to the extinction of the dinosaurs. They appear in the fossil record only after this extinction event.
“We always think about animals, dinosaurs, because they were most affected. But extinction events also had a huge impact on plants.” Say Herrera.
“The forest was reset in a way that changed the composition of its plants.”
Grapevines thrive in dense forests, twining and winding through the understory and canopy, clinging to and supporting other plants. If dinosaurs don’t cut down the forest, There may have been room for grapevine plants to grow.
“Large animals like dinosaurs are known to change their surrounding ecosystems.” explain Carvalho.
“We think that if large dinosaurs had roamed the forests, they would have knocked down trees, effectively maintaining a more open forest than we have today.”
If our planet were to lose life, it wouldn’t take long for something else to fill the gap. If Herrera and his colleagues are right, it was the great dinosaur exodus that allowed our species to eventually domesticate tropical vines. About 8,000 years ago.
congratulations!
The study was published in Natural plants.
