Dinosaur food: 100M year old foods we still eat today | Hacker News Reader

Dinosaur food: 100M year old foods we still eat today

borischerny.com

135 pointsbcherny106 comments

I appreciate the caveat of "morphologically", otherwise chicken would of made that list, as would of the entire avian population.

https://www.edenproject.com/learn/eden-at-home/a-guide-to-pr... has a nice list of plants of the era and "Black peppers" seems to be one that ticks the box's and not upon the list.

Dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets always get a chuckle out of me.

Once we get Jurassic Park up and running we can get chicken shaped dinosaur nuggets.

Kentucky Fried Theropods

Funny we have to euphemise "nuggets" to suppress the true horrors and terrors of meat production. You're getting a chuckle because your brain is off.

To the contrary, nuggets are environmentally friendly. They take a waste product and turn it into gold that people fight over and pay big bucks for.

Its essence of chicken, without all the work of separating and eating the meat yourself.

Quite easily the dumbest comment I've heard on HN. I hope it was sarcasm.

"would have"

Thank you.

No problem, Zenst. It's a common error.

Alternatively, would've

I'd've thought so too.

Thanks! I can't find evidence that black pepper in particular is that old. I'm not sure what Eden Project is, but I can't find any references on the page you linked.

Searching around a bit:

[1] claims Myocene (5-20M years ago)

[2] claims the genus is as old as the Upper Cretaceous (100M years ago), but I don't see the Piper Nigrum (black pepper) species in Table 1.

So, it seems to be a bit more modern than some of the other plants in my post. Please correct me if I missed anything, or if you find a good source!

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10557...

2. https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.3732/ajb....

I regularly eat bunya nuts from the Australian bunya or false monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria bidwillii). It is said to have appeared in the Jurassic (~200 - 145 mya). They are very tasty.

I’m surprised to hear this — living in Sydney, I don’t recall ever seeing any. Where do you find them?

(There’s a smallish bunya-bunya near my house, but I don’t think I’ll try gathering nuts from there myself…)

I am up in Brisbane. I get them from my brother who has a few trees on his property in Maleny. I used to get them from the staff at Roma Street Parkland.

Ah, interesting. In that case, if I want some, I guess I’ll just have to wait until I find a cone myself!

I scrolled looking for these. I get a few every year at my place but tend to marvel at their size, eat a couple raw then throw them away. I've tried oven/fire roasting them like we do macadamias but wasnt too great. Any preparation you recommend?

For people that dont know these, think pine cone thats a little bigger than a bowling ball. They are pretty amazing looking things.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-12/australian-native-bun...

I leave the cone in a bowl until the individual seeds just start separating. Then I pull them off and put them on a tray and in the oven (~150 degrees) for 10 - 15 mins.

It's heavy on plants but plants seem like a trickier source for fossil foods since most plants we eat are domesticated and/or otherwise evolutionarily recent - we eat lots of grasses. Animals we catch might be a good source for new entries - sharks and sturgeons are ancient, hagfish are eaten. Maybe some of the edible seaweeds haven't changed much morphologically?

It's pretty fascinating how recent most plant foods humans eat are.

As you note, grasses (wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley, ...) and maize are both recent developments and exceedingly selected and hybridised by humans.

Both grasses and flowering plants post-date the first emergence of dinosaurs.

Numerous other crops are similarly recent: stone fruits, pomes, etc. Others were available locally but not worldwide: potatoes and tomatoes. I suspect tubers and berries may be among the older plant foods eaten.

> Both grasses and flowering plants

Grasses are a type of flowering plant

Point, though given the present significance of both the broader class of flowering plants, and the specific case of grasses, it's worth noting each individually.

Some sort of global disaster appears to have occurred around 12,000 years ago, with evidence of massive flooding and wildfires and dramatic shifts in climate happening over the course of days and weeks all over the world.

Agriculture and advanced culture may have existed prior to the event, but it looks like the source for flood myths. Aside from Gobekli Tepe and a handful of other sites, it appears most knowledge and culture was lost. People had to start from scratch, so agriculture begins at most 12,000 years ago, comprising almost every plant we eat today. There's no way to know what might have been utterly lost.

There's evidence of modern humans going back almost 300,000 years. (Crazy to think we were without dogs for ~260k years. Humans are better with dogs around. )

Humans probably invented language and writing and all sorts of proto-sciences many times over those hundreds of millenia, but everything before 12,000 years back is gone. There's virtually no evidence of the vast majority of human culture before then. Entropy sucks.

This is an I interesting idea I haven’t heard before - do you have any sources on this?

The Younger Dryas was a climate cooling event around that time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

A minority view holds that the YD was caused by an comet disintegrating and creating a chain of impacts or airbursts across the Northern Hemisphere. A further subset of that minority suggests that those events are the source for flood myths around the world, and speculates that advanced civilizations existed prior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magicians_of_the_Gods

...and you can hear more about it on the Joe Rogan podcast.

Is there a good/extensive take on the mainstream geological and anthropological knowledge of what was going on around that period of time?

There’s a few different myths and theories here. There was an event that killed most humans 50,000+ years ago, probably a volcano.

Later, in the 5,000-15,000 year timeframe there were a few different flooding events, in the Black Sea, Middle East, the North Sea, etc. Presumably they were related, but hundreds or thousands of years may have separated these events. More recently, in the 12th-13th century, tens or hundreds of thousands of people were washed away in the Frisian islands.

Lowland plains are the most fertile places to live, and probably contributes to the universal nature of the flood myth. I would imagine that the current Black Sea was a paradise lost when it flooded, probably quite suddenly, 7,000 years ago.

When you think of ancient oral histories and myths that endured into modern religion, concepts like the garden of Eden, Noah’s flood, days of judgement, etc are powerful morality tales that may have been boiled down from some derivative of actual history. I’ve always found the idea inspirational, as life & humans have a way of powering on in the face of incredible adversity.

There's relatively little archaeological evidence of ancient humans generally. The conditions favouring preservation are fairly strict.

Given that:

1. Human populations tend to travel along and settle near coastlines and rivers, or in low valleys with rich soils whether supporting agriculture or nonagricultural hunter-gatherer societies.

2. Sea levels during the Quaternary Glaciations periods of maximum glacial extent were as much as 100m (330ft) lower than today. Many settlements, communities, and artefacts would be under water now, and many likely degraded.

3. Glaciers themselves would destroy many other terrestrial remains in regions subject to glaciation. Glaciers in particular scour valleys.

The Quatenary Glaciations are multiple periods of cooling and warming extending back over 2.86 million years ... or roughly the entire time since genus homo split from its common ancestors with chimpanzees. Anatomically modern humans are about 200,000 years old. Much of our evolutionary and anthropological history has been subjected to the same stresses and transformations of repeated periods of glaciation and warming.

The places that traces would likely remain tend to be lower latitudes, nearer the equator, away from coasts, and geologically reasonably stable --- sedimentation helps preserve remains, violent tectonic activity not so much. This tends to favour Africa and south-central Asia.

This looks like a pretty interesting abstract: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

Anyone know where I can pick up some "monkey puzzle tree nuts" in the United States?

Not trying to be facetious. but maybe look out for monkey puzzle trees in your area? If you're in the PNW, there a few around: https://www.monumentaltrees.com/en/usa-araucariaaraucana/

Apparently there are quite a few in the Portland area. Someone has been mapping them.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=142zMsWAyuf9uYKGu7t...

I used to ride my bike around every late summer gathering them from people's lawns.

The trees have sexes, so one has to find the female trees.

There are quite a few in Portland, and all relatively the same age because they were given away at the lewis and Clark exposition of 1905 by a representative from Chile.

https://slabtowntours.com/2016/04/19/fun-fact-26-the-seedlin...

They're found virtually everywhere in Florida.

There are some massive examples in Seattle. They are hard to miss and very peculiar. I believe they are an import from the west coast of South America: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araucaria_araucana

Might be hard to find considering they're endangered

The experimental farm network has them for sale - apparently they'll be available March-April.

https://store.experimentalfarmnetwork.org/products/monkey-pu...

Those trees are awesome! Look almost alien but also something I could imagine the dinosaurs eating.

3-4 decades to maturity, before you can harvest seeds, and it looks like you need male and female plants to cause seeding - I wonder if that can be gamed by grafting from mature trees, or artificial hormone sprays?

3-5 cm pine nuts sound awesome, though. 50m tall trees with giant cones and tasty nuts that can live a thousand years - a grove of these on a farm seems like a cool legacy investment, with little chance of becoming invasive or problematic.

The monkey puzzle tree or araucaria can be found in southern Argentina and southern Chile. The nuts are locally known as "piñon" (singular) / "piñones" (plural).

It is not my favourite nut I must say, but the flavor is OK.

They're also common in southern Brazil and Australia. There's an entire region in Brazil known as "Araucaria forest".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araucaria_moist_forests

I love their flavor, by the way.

Do keep in mind that these are very large trees and the leaves(needles) are very prickly to deal with. It takes a long time for them to mature and I have heard people in Seattle say that they never produce cones here.

There are several in our neighborhood, including our neighbor, but the homeowners obviously have no idea how large those trees will get based on where they are planted.

One interesting thing that might be hard to fit into here is the vast vast variety of "spring greens" different human cultures have eaten for a really long time that have since been forgotten about.

Spring is a time of a lot of growth, and young plant growth tends to be the least likely to have bitter or toxic compounds so there are a ton of plants that were munched on in the springtime and only then. Some of them, like spinach or many brassicas, were then domesticated, but many of them remained wild.

My parents grew up in Romania and had many plants they would munch on as kids while outside. And it seems to have been thought of as "kids food" since they weren't really collected in large quantities to make meals.

A lot of these forgotten edibles are often rediscovered in times of economic failures. If you pick up any foraging book today, a ton of that knowledge can be traced back to the Great Depression when people had to rediscover what foods they can rely on

Interesting that the common name of Ginkgo biloba is supposedly "Maidenhair nuts".

I prefer "Ginkgo biloba".

just to point out, the Araucaria Araucana gives "piñón" (a type of pine nut, but not the same). they can be made into flour or be eaten after boiling.

Thanks! The article is open source, so feel free to submit a change directly: https://github.com/bcherny/bcherny.github.io/edit/main/_post...

i just want to know, do they really use the name "monkey puzzle tree" in english speaking countries? i was a little surprised to see that name, given that araucaria is the accepted name for the tree (in spanish).

If we dig deeper in the rabbit hole, araucaria is the name given to the tree (and the zone where the tree grows, and the indigenous (mapuche) people that inhabited, and keeps inhabiting the land) by the spanish empire.

The original name (newen) was given by the mapuche people. "piñon" is also a mapuche word and while we use "araucaria" when refering to the tree, we use "piñón" instead of "araucaria nut". to refer to the edible part.

Apparently 'pinon' simply means "pine nut" in spanish. It makes sense as initially the plant was (mis)named pinus araucana.

Spanish is my mother language, I can confirm that is correct. Well, "piñón" can also mean pinion, as in gear systems, but the context should make the meaning clear.

Likewise, "piña" can mean both pine cone and pineapple, due to their visual similarity.

I’ve definitely heard Araucaria araucana called “monkey puzzle” quite often in English, and many people in Australia mistakenly call the bunya pine (Araucaria bidwillii) “monkey puzzle” as well because they are closely related species and look fairly similar (I’m from Australia). There are several species of Araucaria in Australia though, so many people would also be aware of the Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla) and probably the hoop pine (Araucaria cunninghamii). I think some people who are familiar with the different species would probably understand that if you said “Araucaria” you would be probably be referring to Araucaria araucana.

My Partner had a Monkey Puzzle tree (her description) in her backyard in London. Add me to the anecdote list :)

> Note: I’m a hobbyist, and not a paleobotanist. Additions and edits are welcome, if I misclassified or missed anything.

When does one cross the threshold from hobbyist to paleobotanist? Or from hobbyist to [insert research title]?

Probably when most other [insert reasearch title] would also classify you as a [insert reasearch title] instead of a hobbyist.

When the PhD is conferred.

Probably when you get paid to do work in the field

When there are consequences for you being wrong

Not the wisdom I was expecting to find in this HN post, but it absolutely is the perfect description for when someone can be considered a "professional" of anything.

I’m a big fan of H2O.

The reason I’m posting that here is because for many years I don’t drink it. I was so used to hydrating from soda and other beverages advertised on TV I completely lost touch with plain old H2O.

Then one day I rediscovered its pure refreshing goodness. What a surprise! I savoured it and marvelled at the pureness of the way it quenched my thirst.

Water! Quenching thirst since before the dinosaurs.

Affordable. Convenient if you have a tap. Amazing on a hot day if you have a fridge and a pitcher.

Someone recently was exclaiming how good water was. We had been drinking heavily and I insisted they drank water while we were drinking alcohol since they were complaining about hangovers. They woke up with no hang over.

It turns out they just don't really drink water. It's always something in a can - flavored seltzers or soft drinks.

It kinda blew my mind that there are people out there who don't drink water. It feels as natural as breathing to me.

My kids had friends (round 10 yo) who claimed they did not like the taste of water. That blew their minds since they'd been drinking water their whole life.

It is still the main beverage we drink, and there are still those who never drink it. Incredible.

To be fair, tap water in different places tastes different. If you're in a rural area of the US with well-water, what comes out of the faucet can have a strong rusty taste.

Exactly. As a kid, I thought I hated the taste of water. Our municipal tap water was terrible -- it was safe, but no one drank it because it was so unpleasant.

On the other hand, NYC and SF both have excellent tap water. And other cities are somewhere in between, or at the extreme end can even be dangerous (Flint MI).

The same is true of well water. Some of the best-tasting and perfectly safe water I've ever had has been well water. And as you mention, it can also come in all sorts of off-putting flavors. And it can be contaminated and dangerous (biologically or chemically).

People talk a lot about the variations of coffee or wine or beer, but I think the variations in water are even more interesting (and sometimes contributive to the others).

I used to drink soda for every meal and I went down like 2 inches on my waist size when I stopped. I mean I did eventually gain that back, I guess, but it took years.

How much soda did you drink? I can't imagine a small can of coke makes a difference.

A glass of soda with every meal, maybe more than that. Either way a can of Coke is over 100 calories that don't make you feel full.

I think people react differently and metabolism matters. I find 100 calories is nothing, and you burn that quickly just being alive.

An extra 400 calories a day isn’t nothing.

I have heard folk wisdom to the effect that a can of Coke a day results a pound of weight gain per month. According to this (somewhat dubious) article, 20oz of soda per day results a pound of weight gain per week!

https://abc7news.com/soda-weight-study-on-how-adds-pounds-ga...

Erasmus Darwin wrote in "A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools":

   "For the drink of the more robust children water is preferable, and for the weaker ones, small beer..."

Sounds rather...Darwinian.

That's perhaps from the days when water wasn't quite as clean as it could be, and other drinks were preferred.

Beer is basically liquid bread, so it's nutritious (or at least has calories). Small beer has low alcohol so you don't get drunk

There's something very wrong with the first world when people discover drinking water. I'm not singling you out, I've heard the same story from other people, usually from the US, and it's mind boggling to me. I know it's the parents fault.

It's like discovering that clean air is pretty good for you and feels nice when inhaled.

> I know it's the parents fault.

True. But it might also be because tap water in the places I have been in the US (mostly Raleigh NC) is really not a very pleasant drink.

Soda isn't more convenient than buying bottled water in a shop, so I don't think it's because of water quality.

Isn't the availability of bottled water a relatively recent thing? It certainly wasn't available for most of the time that I lived in the UK (1955 to 1985), but sweetened carbonated drinks have been a thing for well over a hundred years.

That is not true of most areas in the US where tap water is fine to drink. Some localities do have high concentrations of iron or sulfates in the water that taint the flavor.

> It's like discovering that clean air is pretty good for you

Still waiting for this discovery to reach the mainstream so I can live somewhere that has banned cars...

Soda and other beverages are also 98%+ H₂O though. By most standards even beer would count as technical grade H₂O.

Soda is 98% water and 46% sugar.

After watching How to Grow a Planet, I thought about this same question.

Considering flowers appeared to the end of the dinosaur era, there wouldn't be much to eat, except the dinosaurs themselves, and other animals (lots of sea food!).

It's interesting to read about these other plants.

Flowers are necessary for fruit, but not for plants in general. Plants and algae and fungi existed long long before flowers evolved. You can still rely on leaves (spinach, lettuce, chard, etc), roots/tubers (yams, potatoes, carrots, etc), stems (celery, asparagus, bamboo, etc), and many other parts. Not to mention the majority of lichen are edible and the many many edible mushroom species. Also edible algae and seaweeds

Yes, but Dicotyledons are pretty important in our current diet.

Makes me wonder what dinosaurs taste like. And what other delicious plants they had back then.

My guess is they taste like chicken. After all, birds evolved from dinosaurs, and things like frog legs taste like chicken.

Ostrich also evolved from the dinosaurs and has its own unique taste. I bet it varied though probably the range of bird meat tastes is a good place to put our first guesses.

No need to wonder, just go sample some birds.

More to the intent of the question, maybe the more reptilian, ancient ones tasted closer to crocodiles.

Does anyone enjoy horseshoe crab? I've had it once, and there's very little edible meat. Seems more of a novelty than sustenance. (I may have been eating it incorrectly.)

Super-useful creature.

"Horseshoe crab blood: The micracle vaccine ingredient that's saved millions of lives."

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/horseshoe-crab-blood-miracle-...

Damn, this was interesting and depressing the same time.

Not clicking on that. I recall seeing a picture of rows of hundreds of crabs strapped to harnesses, bent in half, with needles in their backs draining their blue blood. Still can't get it out of my head.

had a friend in college who did that as his summer job. They take great care to make prevent them from dying but then they get sold to fishermen to be used as chum... go figure.

Not a botanist, but fiddlehead ferns come to mind as a candidate.

maybe not the safest before we got fire and cooking some ferns have a carcinogen that can be denatured with enough heat

Seems like it's 55M years old, so on the younger end of the list. But it might take a bit more digging to confirm that.

https://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/fern/pteaqu/all.h...

Please feel free to contribute! https://github.com/bcherny/bcherny.github.io/edit/main/_post...

Sago palms are poisonous. I do not know why they are listed as food. All parts of it are poisonous for both humans and animals.

the starch can be extracted and is a common carbohydrate source in some parts of the world

so close darn it! https://www.preceden.com/timelines/68990-evolution-of-the-al...

Sago palm and Cinnamon fern are toxic.

Wikipedia on the Sago Palm: "In metabolic conditions, cycasin is hydrolyzed into glucose and methylazoxymethanol (MAM), the latter of which dissociates into formaldehyde and diazomethane.

Life finds a way to weaponize diazomethane. God help us all.

Interestingly, many of the plants on that list are toxic to some degree. Many take repeated boiling, or can only be eaten in small quantities (eg. Ginkgo).

I mentioned Sacks in the article — he has a fascinating book on cycad toxicity: https://www.oliversacks.com/books-by-oliver-sacks/island-col...

I think it's fair to say most plants are toxic. The ones we eat as staples are the exception. Foods that you might want to use as a staple, like pine nuts and some beans, end up being toxic when consumed regularly, and anything left isn't really suitable as a main source of calories.

Typo in “Horeshoe crab”

Fixed, thanks! FWIW, the page is open source. PRs with corrections/contributions are welcome.

Turtles too.

sharks

oh, and Tarantula spiders also.

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