By Xantha Leatham, Deputy Science Editor for The Daily Mail
15:09 01 July 2024, updated 15:14 01 July 2024
- With no dinosaurs to trample the trees, vines like 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.
The research shows that the death of prehistoric reptiles allowed more trees to grow, which in turn meant vines could flourish.
A team from the Field Museum in Chicago discovered fossilized grape seeds that date back between 60 and 19 million years ago in Colombia, Panama and Peru.
One of these species represents the earliest known example of a grape family plant 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 crashed into Earth, killing three-quarters of all life on the planet, including the dinosaurs.
The consequences allowed small mammals and some birds to thrive – and set the stage for grapes to flourish.
Fabiani Herrera, lead author of the study, said: “These are the oldest grape varieties 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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The researchers said it was no coincidence that grapes first appeared in the fossil record around the same time the Chicxulub asteroid hit Earth.
They suggest that the extinction of the dinosaurs may have helped change the forests, as the large species likely felled trees as they roamed.
Without large dinosaurs to prune them, forests became more crowded with layers of trees – which then allowed vining plants like grapes to climb them.
The diversification of birds and mammals in the years after the mass extinction may have also helped grapes by spreading their seeds, the researchers said.
“We always think about the animals, the dinosaurs, because they were the most affected things, but the extinction had a huge impact on the plants as well,” Dr Herrera said.
“The forest rearranged itself in a way that changed the composition of the plants.
“In the fossil record, we’re starting to see more plants that used vines to climb trees, like grapes, at that time.”
The findings are published in the journal Nature Plants.
