Dinosaurs' Extinction May Have Been the Birth of Wine

Had an asteroid not struck the planet some 66 million years ago, dinosaurs might still exist—but there would potentially be no wine. According to researchers, grapes might have originated only after the Chicxulub impact transformed the environment, wiping out 76% of all living species, per IFL Science. "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," Fabiany Herrera, a paleobotanist at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, says in a press release. "The forest reset itself, in a way that changed the composition of the plants."

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Herrera and colleagues identified nine new species of fossilized grape seeds from across Colombia, Panama, and Peru, dated to between 19 million and 60 million years old. The oldest sample, dubbed Lithouva susmanii, or "Susman's stone grape," represents the oldest grape ever found in the Western Hemisphere. Closely related to the subfamily Vitoideae, which gave rise to commercial grapes, the sample is only slightly younger than the oldest known fossilized grape seeds, found in India and dated to 66 million years ago, around the time of the Chicxulub impact, per University of Michigan News. "This discovery is important because it shows that after the extinction of the dinosaurs, grapes really started to spread across the world," says Herrera, lead author of a study published Tuesday in Nature Plants.

According to the study, dinosaurs and other large animals would've trodden on plants and knocked down trees, encouraging open forests. Once those animals were gone, forests became more dense and crowded. "In the fossil record, we start to see more plants that use vines to climb up trees, like grapes, around this time," Herrera says in the release. And "we find the earliest record of Vitoideae, telling us that the lineage of grapes dates back to the origin of the first neotropical rainforests," study co-author Monica Carvalho, a botanist and paleobiologist at the University of Michigan, tells U-Michigan News. (More discoveries stories.)