If dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct some 66 million years ago, we might not have wine today! Researchers have discovered that the mass extinction event changed the environment in such a way that grapes then were able to thrive on earth. “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,” paleobotanist Fabiany Herrera said. Herrera and some of her peers examined grape seeds that were up to 60 million years old. They speculate that large animals like dinosaurs would have stepped on plants, which prevented forests from thriving. “In the fossil record, we start to see more plants that use vines to climb up trees, like grapes, around this time,” Herrera said. (newser)
Phone Topic: What is your favorite “butterfly effect”?