The research pushes back on the idea that flowering plants didn\u2019t develop large fruits and seeds<\/a> until after the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs roughly 66 million years ago.<\/p>\n A new narrative<\/p>\n Paleobotanists had generally assumed that flowering plants<\/a> only picked up their modern reproductive tricks after the asteroid impact ended the Cretaceous.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFor much of their early history, they were relatively small, weedy plants that did not dominate forest canopies,\u201d said James Saulsbury<\/a>, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Kansas. <\/p>\n Even as these plants spread and diversified over millions of years, the general assumption was that their seeds stayed tiny, riding the wind rather than tempting animals with fleshy fruit.<\/p>\n According to the researchers, early seeds and fruits probably ranged from about dust-particle size up to, at most, something like a poppy seed.\u00a0<\/p>\n Compare that to today, where flowering plants use a huge range of tricks to get their seeds around. <\/p>\n Plenty produce big, fleshy fruit, such as apples, pears, avocados<\/a>, olives, or coconuts. Such fruits are built specifically to lure animals into doing the spreading for them.<\/p>\n A unique fossil site<\/p>\n \u201cThe prevailing view has been that this more diverse reproductive ecology emerged only after the end-Cretaceous extinction,\u201d said Saulsbury.<\/p>\n \u201cThe largest fruits in our fossil flora are about the size of a grape. That may not sound especially large today, but it is remarkably large for flowering plants of that period.\u201d<\/p>\n That evidence comes out of an extraordinary fossil site near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where Saulsbury and his colleagues spent years doing fieldwork.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe New Mexico fossil site is exceptional. My co-authors have referred to it as a \u2018botanical Pompeii\u2019 because of its remarkable preservation,\u201d said Saulsbury.<\/p>\n \u201cThe site contains a layer of volcanic ash<\/a> preserved as rock, known as tuff, that stretches for more than a kilometer. The deposits formed at essentially the same time, preserving many plants where they lived and died.\u201d<\/p>\n Huge varieties of fruits<\/p>\n What makes the site remarkable isn\u2019t just how well it preserved things, but also the sheer variety and size of the fruits and seeds found there.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHowever, we don\u2019t believe these findings are simply the result of preservation bias,\u201d Saulsbury said.<\/p>\n This represents a very unusual forest. That distinction matters because fruit size ties into far more than plant reproduction alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cLarge fruits tend to occur in moist environments with densely packed forests,\u201d Saulsbury added.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOur findings indicate that modern-looking forest structure and reproductive ecology were developing earlier than previously believed.\u201d<\/p>\n Flowering plants did not wait until after the dinosaur extinction to evolve new ways of reproducing.<\/p>\n Original fruit-spreaders<\/p>\n The findings also challenge another widely accepted idea, that large fruits evolved specifically alongside the mammal boom that followed the dinosaurs<\/a>\u2018 extinction.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAs mammals expanded into newly available ecological niches, flowering plants were thought to have diversified their seed dispersal strategies in response,\u201d Saulsbury said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rather than emerging after the dinosaurs disappeared, large fruits appear to have evolved while dinosaurs still roamed<\/a> the Earth.<\/p>\n Those animals likely helped spread their seeds. That\u2019s a genuinely different way to picture Cretaceous forests.<\/p>\n Instead of a world of small, wind-scattered plants patiently waiting around for mammals to inherit the Earth, this research suggests otherwise.<\/p>\n Dinosaurs themselves may have been actively shaping how early fruiting plants spread and diversified.<\/p>\n Hundreds of tiny fossils<\/p>\n Saulsbury was out in the field for this one too, collecting fossils and handling much of the early classification, measuring, and analysis.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cWe sorted hundreds of fossil seeds into what we call morphotypes,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThese are groupings based on form rather than confirmed species because it is often impossible to determine whether similar-looking fossils represent one species or several.\u201d<\/p>\n That kind of painstaking, uncertain sorting work is exactly what let the team piece together a much more sophisticated picture of Cretaceous plant life than anyone had assumed.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is a story where dinosaurs weren\u2019t just wandering through the forest but actively helping build it.<\/p>\n The study is published in the journal Science<\/a>.<\/p>\n Image Credit: Illustration by Brian Engh<\/p>\n \u2014-<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The timeline for fruit evolution has shifted dramatically. Researchers now suggest large, fleshy fruits evolved tens of millions…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":794351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,128],"class_list":["post-794350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=794350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/794351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=794350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=794350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=794350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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