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Comment by charliebwrites | Hacker News Reader

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charliebwrites·

They’re definitely the current insect plague of my tomato plants

Funny to think that some (proto?) human was swearing at these things 295 million years ago the same way I am

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The earliest hominids came around ~10 million years ago, so unlikely.

just let the "proto" do the work and enjoy the joke

The "proto" in this case would have to refer to a synapsid, which have been described as "mammal-like reptiles", some of whom were the ancestors of the mammals which didn't yet exist 295 million years ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsida

Nor did tomatoes, nor any type of fruit nor flowering plant at all, exist 295M years ago

I actually didn’t know that, TIL.

The one for me which was quite surprising is how recent grasses are. Grass is 110M or so year old, but grasses as we know them - the plains, covering vast spaces, etc. - the C4 grasses, are all in the 5m-15M years ago period. Imagine an earth with no sprawling grasses.

I found that surprising when I learned about it. Grass did not exist yet at the time of the dinosaurs. In good documentaries, artistic representations of dinosaurs may show them among ferns and trees, that did exist. But if I see grass I will know the team did not do a good job!

Nor did any mammals exist then.

There were big proto reptiles like Edaphosaurus that could have shaken their fist at a bug infestation though

But they didn't have prehensile hands, so no fists for them!

It took evolution another 230-280 million years to develop fists to shake at bug infestations.

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