The oldest known grape fossils in the west

Sixty-million-year-old grape seeds reveal how the death of the dinosaurs may have paved the way for grapes to spread. Researchers found fossil grape seeds that range from 60 to 19 million years old in Colombia, Panama, and Peru.  One of these species represents the earliest known example of plants from the grape family in the Western Hemisphere. 

The earliest known grape seed fossils found in India are 66 million years old – that’s around the time when an asteroid hit the Earth, triggering a massive extinction including the dinosaurs that altered the course of life on the planet. The extinction event had an enormous impact on plants, too. The forest reset itself in a way that changed the composition of plant life. Without large dinosaurs to prune them, some tropical forests, including those in South America, became more crowded, with layers of trees and shrubs forming an understory and a canopy.

These new, dense forests provided an opportunity. The fossil record shows more plants that used vines, like grapes, to climb up trees around this time. The diversification of birds and mammals in the years following the mass extinction may have also aided grapes by spreading their seeds.

The team named the fossil Lithouva susmanii, “Susman’s stone grape,” in honour of Arthur T. Susman, a supporter of South American palaeobotany at the Field Museum. This new species is important because it supports a South American origin of the group in which the common grape vine genus, Vitis, evolved.

Read the article for more interesting insights.