Xantha Leatham, deputy science editor for The Daily Mail
15:09 01 July 2024, updated 15:14 01 July 2024
- Without dinosaurs to trample the trees, vine plants such as grapes flourished
- READ MORE: Asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago
The next time you open a bottle of wine, it might be worth raising a glass to the dinosaurs.
That’s because their extinction caused by a giant asteroid paved the way for the spread of grapes, a new study suggests.
Research shows that the extinction of prehistoric reptiles allowed more trees to grow, which in turn meant vines could flourish.
A team from the Field Museum in Chicago discovered fossil grape seeds that date from 60 to 19 million years ago in Colombia, Panama and Peru.
One of these species represents the earliest known example of a grape family in the Western Hemisphere, and the seeds help show how the grape family evolved.
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About 66 million years ago, an asteroid larger than Mount Everest hit Earth and killed three-quarters of all life on the planet, including the dinosaurs.
The consequences allowed small mammals and some birds to thrive – and laid the groundwork for grapes to flourish.
Fabiany Herrera, lead author of the study, said: “These are the oldest grapes ever found in this part of the world, and are several million years younger than the oldest ever found on the other side of the planet.
“This discovery is important because it shows that after the extinction of the dinosaurs, grapes really began to spread around the world.”
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Scientists said it’s no coincidence that grapes first appeared in the fossil record around the same time the Chicxulub asteroid hit Earth.
They suggest that the disappearance of the dinosaurs may have helped change the forests, as large species likely felled trees as they roamed.
Without large dinosaurs to cut them down, forests were more crowded with layers of trees – which then allowed vine plants like grapes to climb up them.
The diversification of birds and mammals in the years following the mass extinction may also have helped grapes by dispersing their seeds, the researchers said.
“We always think of the animals, the dinosaurs, because those were the biggest things that could have been affected, but the extinction event also had a huge impact on the plants,” Dr Herrera said.
“The forest regenerated in a way that changed the composition of the plants.
“In the fossil record around this time, we start to see more plants that use vines to climb trees, like grapes.”
The findings were published in the journal Nature Plants.