Do we drink wine because an asteroid killed off almost all dinosaurs millions of years ago? Possibly, per new research published July 1 in the journal Nature Plants. In their paper, researchers Fabiany Herrera, Mónica Carvalho, Gregory Stull, Carlos Jaramillo and Steven Manchester reveal they’ve used ancient grapeseed fossils, the first of their kind found in Central and South America, to newly identify nine grapevine species across Colombia, Panama and Peru. This includes a 60 million–year-old fossil that is now the oldest-known grape evidence in the Western Hemisphere, and among the most ancient in the world. (The youngest of the pip fossils is about 19 million years old.)
“I've been looking for the oldest grape in the Western Hemisphere since I was an undergrad student,” said Herrera, an assistant curator of paleobotany at the Field Museum in Chicago’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center, in a statement. “Grapes have an extensive fossil record that starts about 50 million years ago, so I wanted to discover one in South America, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
In 2022, Herrera and Carvalho found that figurative needle within a 60 million–year-old rock in the Colombian Andes. “[Carvalho] looked at me and said, ‘Fabiany, a grape!’ And then I looked at it; I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ It was so exciting,” Herrera explained.
After identifying that fossil by appearance, Herrera and Carvalho used CT scans to look inside, confirming it was, indeed, a grapeseed, and they named the species Lithouva susmanii after Field Museum patron Arthur Susman. The grape, along with the other fossils Herrera et al. studied, is in the Vitaceae family, which includes the Vitis vinifera species used for most of the world’s winemaking today.
What's the Oldest Grapeseed Fossil? And What About the Dinosaurs?
Manchester identified the oldest-known grapeseed fossil in 2013; found in India, it was only about 6 million years older than the Lithouva seed, and there’s a gigantic, fiery reason why that’s probably not a coincidence: It was about 66 million years ago that a massive asteroid smashed into Earth, causing the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that annihilated all non-avian dinosaur species on the planet.
While the dinosaurs were away, the vines did play. “We always think about the [dinosaurs] because they were the biggest things to be affected, but the extinction event had a huge impact on plants too,” said Herrera. “The forest reset itself in a way that changed the composition of the plants.” The researchers suggest that without dinosaurs knocking down trees, forests grew denser, and that means more trunks and branches for vines to climb, thriving. Plus, growing numbers of grape-hungry birds and mammals may have helped spread the vines’ seeds.
“The fossil record tells us that grapes are a very resilient order,” said Herrera, who notes that this research shines a light on crises in biodiversity (still a major concern today, unfortunately). “They're a group that has suffered a lot of extinction in the Central and South American [regions], but they also managed to adapt and survive in other parts of the world.”
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