If you enjoy a glass or two of wine, it may be because the dinosaurs went extinct.
CNN said grapes “have been tied to the story of humanity for thousands of years,” but “may not have been so” if the dinosaurs had not gone extinct.
take over the world
When an asteroid hit Earth 66 million years ago, it “destroyed the huge megafauna,” the announcer said, paving the way for other organisms and plants to “flourish” in its aftermath.
participation in the week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Subscribe and save
Sign up for this week's free newsletters.
From the morning news bulletin to the weekly good news newsletter, get the best of the week straight to your inbox.
From the morning news bulletin to the weekly good news newsletter, get the best of the week straight to your inbox.
After discovering and analyzing fossilized grape seeds that are between 19 million and 60 million years old, experts now believe that these ancient grapes established a foothold in the dense forests of the Earth after dinosaurs trampled around them.
Scientists believe that dinosaurs may have been “cutting down trees, keeping forests more open than they are today,” said Monica Carvalho, a co-author of the study, so their extinction allowed trees to grow taller and develop closed canopies. This change “profoundly changed” the evolution of plants, especially those that produce fruit.
Meanwhile, the increased diversity of birds and mammals in the years following the dinosaurs' extinction may also have helped the grapes spread, as these creatures “ate them and excreted their seeds,” the BBC reported.
“It was already known that humans first domesticated grapes only a few thousand years ago, but we now know that the fruit has a much longer evolutionary history,” Fabiani Herrera, the study’s lead author, told USA Today. “Grapes didn’t start to take over the world until after the dinosaurs went extinct,” Herrera told USA Today.
Climate crisis
In addition to looking to the past, experts are looking to the future. By increasing their understanding of the origins and adaptations of plants in the past, scientists can better understand how they might weather the climate crisis.
Herrera said he hopes that “most living plant seeds will adapt quickly to the current climate crisis” because although the fossil record of seeds “tells us that plants are resilient,” they could “completely disappear from an entire continent.”
The search in the “dense forests of Latin American countries” was extremely difficult, as the team was looking for grape seeds, which “are very challenging to find because of their small size,” according to USA Today.
But for Herrera, it was all part of the fun. “I like finding really small things because they’re really useful too, and grape seeds are one of those things,” he said.
So next time you enjoy a glass of wine, be sure to raise your glass to the dinosaurs because if they didn't have the courage to disappear from the planet, you might never have been able to enjoy your favorite beverage.
