Who would have thought that something as widely consumed today as the grape has its prehistoric roots in the time of the dinosaurs?
In a groundbreaking discovery published in the journal Nature Plants, researchers found fossil grape seeds ranging from 60 to 19 million years old in Colombia, Panama, and Peru.
These fossil seeds explain how the grape family spread following the extinction of the dinosaurs, with one species representing the earliest known example of grape plants in the Western Hemisphere.
MALTON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 28: Red grapes hang on the vine at Ryedale Vineyards on September 28, 2013 in Malton, England. Photo by Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
Dinosaur Fossil Finds Offer Insights Into the Oldest Grapes Ever Found
According to Fabiany Herrera, an assistant curator of paleobotany at the Field Museum in Chicago and lead author of the study, these are the oldest grapes ever found in this region and they are a few million years younger than the oldest ones found elsewhere in the world.
This discovery is noteworthy because it demonstrates that grapes began to spread globally after the dinosaurs' extinction.
The study emphasizes the rarity of soft tissue preservation in fossils, as fruits like grapes usually decompose quickly. Thus, scientists often rely on seeds, which are more likely to fossilize, to understand ancient fruits.
The earliest known grape seed fossils, found in India, date back 66 million years-coinciding with the asteroid impact that triggered a massive extinction event.
"We always think about the animals, the dinosaurs, because they were the biggest things to be affected, but the extinction event had a huge impact on plants too," Herrera explains in a press release. "The forest reset itself, in a way that changed the composition of the plants."
Herrera and his colleagues hypothesize that the extinction of the dinosaurs helped transform ancient forests.
Mónica Carvalho, a co-author and assistant curator at the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology, suggests that large animals like dinosaurs are known to modify their ecosystems.
She believes that if large dinosaurs were present in the forest, they would likely knock down trees, leading to a more open forest structure than what exists today.
Without these large dinosaurs, tropical forests became denser, with layers of trees forming an understory and a canopy. This new environment provided an opportunity for vine plants like grapes to thrive.
In 2022, during fieldwork in the Colombian Andes, Herrera and Carvalho discovered a 60-million-year-old grape fossil. The fossil was named Lithouva susmanii, or "Susman's stone grape," in honor of Arthur T. Susman, a supporter of South American paleobotany.
"The fossil record tells us that grapes are a very resilient order. They're a group that has suffered a lot of extinction in the Central and South American region, but they also managed to adapt and survive in other parts of the world," says Herrera.
According to the researchers, this study provides valuable insights into how biodiversity crises unfold, a topic increasingly relevant given the current mass extinction event the planet faces because of factors like climate change and excessive human impact.
