- Without dinosaurs to trample on trees, vine plants such as grapes flourished
- READ MORE: Asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago
The next time you crack open a bottle of wine, it could be worth raising a glass to the dinosaurs.
That’s because their extinction, caused by an enormous asteroid, paved the way for the spread of grapes, a new study suggests.
The research indicates that the demise of the prehistoric reptiles allowed more trees to grow, which in turn meant grape vines could flourish.
A team from the Field Museum in Chicago have discovered fossil grape seeds that date back to between 60 and 19 million years ago in Colombia, Panama and Peru.
One of these species represents the earliest known example of plants from the grape family in the Western Hemisphere, and the seeds help show how the grape family evolved.
It’s already well known that the dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chicxulub impact event – a plummeting asteroid or comet that slammed into a shallow sea in what is today the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico around 66 million years ago (file photo)
Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid bigger than Mount Everest smashed into the Earth, killing off three quarters of all life on the planet including the dinosaurs.
The aftermath allowed for 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 they’re a few million years younger than the oldest ones 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 started to spread across the world.’
Lithouva from Colombia is the earliest fossil grape from the Western Hemisphere, at around 60 million years old. Top figure shows fossil accompanied with CT scan reconstruction. Bottom shows artist reconstruction
The researchers said it’s not a coincidence that grapes first appeared in the fossil record at around the same time as the Chicxulub asteroid hit Earth.
They suggest that the disappearance of the dinosaurs might have helped alter the forests, because large species were likely knocking down trees as they roamed.
Without large dinosaurs to prune them, the forests became more crowded with layers of trees – which then allowed vine plants such as grapes to climb up them.
The diversification of birds and mammals in the years following the mass extinction may also have aided grapes by spreading their seeds, the researchers said.
Mónica Carvalho, a co-author of the paper, holding the fossil of the oldest grape seed found in the Western Hemisphere
‘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,’ Dr Herrera said.
‘The forest reset itself, in a way that changed the composition of the plants.
‘In the fossil record, we start to see more plants that use vines to climb up trees, like grapes, around this time.’
The findings were published in the journal Nature Plants.