Sixty-million-year-old grape seeds reveal how the death of the dinosaurs may have paved the way for grapes to spread
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If you've ever snacked on raisins or enjoyed a glass of wine, you may, in part, have the extinction of the dinosaurs to thank for it. In a discovery described in the journal Nature Plants, researchers found fossil grape seeds that range from 60 to 19 million years old in Colombia, Panama, and Perú. One of these species represents the earliest known example of plants from the grape family in the Western Hemisphere. These fossil seeds help show how the grape family spread in the years following the death of the dinosaurs.
"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," says Fabiany Herrera, an assistant curator of paleobotany at the Field Museum in Chicago's Negaunee Integrative Research Center and the lead author of the paper. "This discovery is important because it shows that after the extinction of the dinosaurs, grapes really started to spread across the world."
