60 million-year-old seeds reveal that dinosaur extinction paved the way for grapes

Grapes have been intertwined with the story of humanity for millennia, providing the basis for wines produced by our ancestors thousands of years ago — but that may not have been the case if dinosaurs hadn’t disappeared from the planet, according to new research.

Grapes have been intertwined with the story of humanity for millennia, providing the basis for wines produced by our ancestors thousands of years ago — but that may not have been the case if dinosaurs hadn’t disappeared from the planet, according to new research.

When an asteroid struck Earth 66 million years ago, it wiped out the massive, lumbering animals and set the stage for other creatures and plants to thrive in the aftermath.

Now, the discovery of fossilized grape seeds in Colombia, Panama and Peru that range from 19 million to 60 million years old is shedding light on how these humble fruits captured a foothold in Earth’s dense forests and eventually established a global presence. One of the newly discovered seeds is the oldest example of plants from the grape family to be found in the Western Hemisphere, according to a study on the specimens published Monday in the journal Nature Plants.

“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,” said lead study author Fabiany Herrera, an assistant curator of paleobotany at the Field Museum in Chicago’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center, in a statement. “This discovery is important because it shows that after the extinction of the dinosaurs, grapes really started to spread across the world.”

Much like the soft tissues of animals, actual fruits don’t preserve well in the fossil record. But seeds, which are more likely to fossilize, can help scientists understand what plants were present at different stages in Earth’s history as they reconstruct the tree of life and establish origin stories.

The oldest grape seed fossils found so far were unearthed in India and date back 66 million years, to about the time of the dinosaurs’ demise.

“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 said. “The forest reset itself in a way that changed the composition of the plants.”