Wine fans may have dinosaurs to thank after 60M-year-old grape fossil seeds found

A group of scientists with Chicago’s Field Museum recently discovered grape fossil seeds that could connect dinosaurs to today’s numerous wine offerings. The South America study found nine new species of fossil grapes dating back to at least 19 million years ago — with the oldest one found in a 60-million-year-old rock. Dr.Fabiany Herrera, assistant curator of paleobotany at The Field Museum, led the study. The discovery proved that grapes spread across the world after the extinction of the dinosaurs, as a press release noted. “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,” Herrera said in the release.The seeds found in Colombia, Panama and Peru could be anywhere between 19 and 60 million years old, according to the press release.Dr.

Monica Carvalho, an assistant curator at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology and the study’s co-author, said that years ago, dinosaurs were likely knocking down trees while moving through the forests — ultimately leading ecosystems to die out.“We think that if there were large dinosaurs roaming through the forest, they were likely knocking down trees, effectively making forests more open than they are today,” she said in a media statement.However, once dinosaurs became extinct some 66 million years ago, plants re-grew in areas in South America — and trees formed in close quarters, said Herrera. “In the fossil record, we start to see more plants that use vines to climb up trees, like grapes, around this time,” he said. He explained further why he wanted to discover the “needle in a haystack” in South America. “I’ve been looking for the oldest grape in the Western Hemisphere since I was an undergrad student,” he said. Herrera added that Carvalho was the one who found the first grape fossil.He said she yelled, “Fabiany, a grape!”He said, as t...