Ancient flowering plants may have used dinosaurs to spread their seeds
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(See our AI policy here .) Fruit salad may have been on the menu for some dinosaurs. Over 74 million years ago, there was a richer garden of fruit- and seed-bearing plants than scientists thought. A fossil analysis suggests that tall forest trees spread winged seeds and fed animals with fleshy, blueberry-sized fruits long before the reign of the dinosaurs ended, researchers report June 25 in Science.
The findings upend our understanding of the evolution of flowering plants, say paleoecologist Jaemin Lee of the University of California, Berkeley and colleagues. The traditional view was that flowering plants, called angiosperms, used mostly wind and other inanimate means of seed dispersal until the end of the Cretaceous Period. It wasn’t until an asteroid struck Earth 66 million years ago, causing a mass extinction event that killed all nonavian dinosaurs and made way for the Age of Mammals, that angiosperms hit their stride.
In this new world, the plants evolved a wider, more complex repertoire of seeds and fruits that were often eaten and carried away by animals. But an analysis of fossil diaspores — structures that include fruits and seeds — from the Late Cretaceous challenges this narrative. Lee’s team examined 450 fossils that were unearthed from a layer of ancient volcanic ash in south-central New Mexico from 1992 through 2016.
The diaspores took on nearly 80 different shapes. Some had winged forms while more than a third were fleshy like berries. The largest were about the size of a small date.
“There are rocks with a bunch of large diaspores preserved together,” Lee says. “They make me think of trays of grapes or pistachios.” Until now, the diversity of diaspore types prior to the extinction was thought to be low, says Brian Atkinson, a paleobiologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who was not involved in the work. And records of large, fleshy fruits were few and far between.
“This study suggests that bigger diaspore sizes were certainly well-established before the end of the Cretaceous,” Atkinson says. “That’s a very important finding.”
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