Paleobotanists have described nine new species of the grape family Vitaceae on the basis of 60- to 19-million-year-old fossil seeds discovered in four Neotropical paleofloras. These include Lithouva susmanii from Colombia, a new species that provides the earliest evidence of Vitaceae in the western hemisphere.
It’s rare for soft tissues like fruits to be preserved as fossils, so scientists’ understanding of ancient fruits often comes from the seeds, which are more likely to fossilize.
The earliest known grape seed fossils were found in India and are 66 million years old.
“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,” said Dr. Fabiany Herrera, a paleobotanist at the Field Museum.
“The forest reset itself, in a way that changed the composition of the plants.”
Dr. Herrera and his colleagues hypothesize that the disappearance of the dinosaurs might have helped alter the forests.
“Large animals, such as dinosaurs, are known to alter their surrounding ecosystems,” said Dr. Mónica Carvalho, a paleobotanist at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology.
“We think that if there were large dinosaurs roaming through the forest, they were likely knocking down trees, effectively maintaining forests more open than they are today.”
“But without large dinosaurs to prune them, some tropical forests, including those in South America, became more crowded, with layers of trees forming an understory and a canopy.”
“These new, dense forests provided an opportunity. In the fossil record, we start to see more plants that use vines to climb up trees, like grapes, around this time,” Dr. Herrera said.
“The diversification of birds and mammals in the years following the mass extinction may have also aided grapes by spreading their seeds.”
The researchers examined the fossilized grape seeds from the 60-million-year-old Bogota…
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