Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
borischerny.com
borischerny.com
Dogs do this instinctively too when they might need something from the dirt.
2. Thamarai Thandu Uppukari (Lotus Stem Dry Curry): A preparation where the lotus stem is boiled with salt, then deep-fried or stir-fried until light golden brown to create a crispy side dish, often served with rasam rice.
3. Thamarai Kizhangu Vathal (Dried Lotus Root Crisps): A traditional, shelf-stable snack where the lotus stem is sliced, salted, and dried, then fried before consumption.
4. Lotus Petal Paruppu Usili (Steamed Lentil Crumble): A dish made by finely chopping tender inner lotus petals and mixing them with coarsely ground, steamed, and crumbled lentils (dal), similar to traditional Tamil Paruppu Usili.
5. Thamara Vadai (Lotus Stem Fritters): A traditional snack in South India that uses sliced lotus stem in a seasoned batter, similar to a vadai.
Lichen and moss being the most ancient foods makes sense to me based on watching episodes of Alone. You can get calories from that stuff if you're desperate, but it sure doesn't seem a pleasant way to sustain yourself.
People from other continents always surprise me with various fruits they taken for granted their entire life, but I've never heard about, and vice-versa.
Clearly, for instance Welwitschia (1) listed. I think this says a lot about location.
It's a fascinating plant, but it is an endangered species, endemic to the Namib desert. And as far as I know, not that commonly eaten.
I need to get food at the market, not wait for it to fall into a trap or fight it to death.
I'm having trouble finding sources for other specific fern species, though many ferns have been around for hundreds of millions of years.
On a side note there are 1000s even 10s of thousand of edible plant based species that grow on the earth. i don't know how old they are though.
I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find sources for known age of species - is that information collected somewhere? Or is it something we often just don't know because of how sparse the fossil record is?
Wondering because of trying to look up the age of fern species I do eat (no cinnamon fern near me) and I can't find out.
It depends on what you mean by the age of the species. You can find the oldest known fossil occurrence at the Paleobiology Database [1] and the divergence time from molecular phylogenies via TimeTree [2].
That's simply due to the nature of evolution. It's nearly impossible to look at one past generation of chicken to the next to figure out when the ancestor was no longer a chicken. Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix.
Every generation is a new missing link. It's an extremely fuzzy process.
Afaik, T-Rex was never a direct ancestor of modern birds, including chicken. T-Rex and birds are theropod dinosaurs, but it was a very large and diverse group of animals.
I get your meaning, just a funny phrasing.
The number is both incalculable and vague - is a shark tooth enough to count as a fossil? How about diatoms and other microfossils?
Diatomaceous earth alone contains around 10^6-10^7 frustules (the shell of a diatom) per gram. If you count them as fossils then the lower bound is 10^18 fossils per year just in diatomaceous earth production (the fossils are ancient but we produce nearly a million tons a year in diatomaceous earth).
No, but a fossil of a shark tooth counts as a fossil..
Then consider what's buried under the sea, totally inaccessible. Or under the ice at the poles.
It's a lot of fossils. And that's without even getting into questions like "what counts as a fossil for these purposes?", just any halfway sensible answer is going to leave you with an unfathomably big number, no need to even dig (ha, ha) into the specifics.
The places scientists go to dig up fossils are mostly where a particular stratum happens to exist (the crust gets recycled, so much of the oldest stuff is simply gone in most of the world) and happens to be exposed near the surface. Those same kinds of (for the more common strata, anyway) exist all over the place, just buried too deep to get at except, sometimes, during commercial excavation for things like mining (and then most of it's just gonna be destroyed without a look).
Keep in mind that the further you go back the bigger the error bars on these date estimates, and that a tidy split is an abstraction over a more messy reality (example: we know the hominid groups interbred, giving people with european ancestry some fraction of neanderthal dna).
Though, were I a crab of any sort, anywhere, I'd live in terror of a hungry Cantonese chef...
Isn't the first dinosaurs appeared like 400m years ago, but Ginkgo only 290m?
While there were creatures that looked like dinosaurs in the Permian period (298 mya) - creatures like the dimetrodon (the one with the sail on its back that you'd find next to dinosaurs in the museum - though the dimetrodon is of the branch that lead to mammals rather than reptiles) and early lizards and turtles - these aren't dinosaurs.
The actual fruit (looks like a rotten plum, smells terrible) has ginkgolic acids which cause contact dermatitis (think poison ivy).
Then the nuts themselves contain Ginkgotoxin, which interferes with your B6, screwing up your nervous system and causing seizures. Cooking reduces but does not eliminate Ginkgotoxin.
I only ate one, and ate it raw. It was a delightful texture, but tasted like chewing random plant matter. Like leaves from a tree. Was maybe half a cubic centimeter of matter. Escaped any ill effects.
According to my research, kids can have seizures from as few as 10 nuts, which would probably be like 1.5 spoonfuls if you mashed them up. The guidelines I found don't seem very scientific but supposedly a kid can safely handle 3-5 nuts over the course of a day, and an adult could handle 5-10. So it doesn't seem like there is a good margin of safety.
Overall a real risk to health for an insignificant amount of food that doesn't taste special. But a nice texture.
Lots of food is like this, for example mangoes.
Barley and Yogurt, they are the dogs we domesticated from wolves that changed us too.
Daily barley water is a life changer, I don't think our digestive systems really function without a smidgen of daily barley.
The roasted or cooked nut of the ginkgo tastes good and is filling. Not something to eat in volume anyways. You'd probably quit before any toxicity manifests.
The fruit looks appetizing and at most smells a little funky when there are tons of them around a female tree.
I have always known it's inedible to humans so I have never tried but it could taste like custard given its color. Presumably whatever used to disperse it could eat it.
Other coniferous arils are tasty and sweet like yew for example even though the nut is supposed to be very poisonous.
Edit: transcript of a video about the sloth/avocado thing: https://nerdfighteria.info/v/jpcBgYYFS8o
"Fish", if taken as a monophyletic term, includes land mammals because tetrapods are osteichthyans -- bony fish.
In common use, "fish" is, however a paraphyletic group which excludes tetrapods but otherwise includes all other osteichthyans.
Since starfishes don't include tetrapods, nor vice versa (nor do they share biological features to be in a polyphyletic grouping like "crabs"), the relevant common term is "Animalia" -- "animal".
Nope, and this is trivial to check. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avocado#Taxonomy_and_evolution
The proposed seed dispersers are now-extinct mammalian megafauna. Much more recent than the dinosaurs - 10k to 100k years ago.
Wasn't dinosaurs, it was probably some kind of proboscidian gompothere.