Image courtesy of Brian Engh
Joel Kontinen
According
to evolution, dinosaurs now lived with flowering
plants. This is new, as the standard view of din9saurs was that they only eat each
other or some form of cones,
.“Jonathan Birch at the
London School of Economics says the study is the first time he has seen
“wanting” and “liking” disentangled in a bee."
“We underestimate insects so much,” he says. “It’s led to a golden age of
very charming studies where scientists use modern techniques – sometimes just
high-resolution, high-frame-rate video, as in this study – to reveal behaviours
people have been missing.”
A wide
variety of fruits and seeds that were smothered in the ash from a volcanic
eruption nearly 75 million years ago suggest flowering plants were diverse and
thriving in the time of the dinosaurs, far earlier than previously known.
Researchers
had thought the emergence of large seeds and fruits followed the end-Cretaceous extinction, 66 million years ago, and was tied to the rise of mammals and
birds.
“Now, we
have evidence that large fruit and seeds and the related ecological conditions
can be traced back to 10 million years before the asteroid impact that according
to evolution wiped out the dinosaurs,” says Jaemin Lee at the University of California,
Berkeley.
The team
discovered an extraordinary 77 different kinds of fruits and seeds. Such a
ready banquet of nutritious fruit would almost certainly have been eaten by
herbivorous dinosaurs and other animals.The first flowering plants emerge in
the fossil record 136 million years ago, but, until now, it was thought early
forms were mostly small and weedy and vastly different to the range of species
that dominate Earth’s forests today.
In Cretaceous
deposits elsewhere, the fruit and seeds are roughly the size of a poppy
seed on average – far smaller than the blueberry-sized seeds at Jose Creek.
Yes,
according to Genesis, flowers and animals were created at the same time.
Source:
James Woodforg 2026 Fossil fruits show flowering plants flourished in time of dinosaurs | New Scientist 25 June
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