Biology

3852 readers

109 users here now

This is a general community to discuss of all things related to biology!

For a more specific community about asking questions to biologists, you can also visit:

/c/askbiologists@lemmy.world

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

Sal@mander.xyz

Dinosaur Food: 100 million year old foods we still eat today (borischerny.com)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/biology@mander.xyz

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I just finished Oliver Sacks’ excellent Everything in Its Place. In it, he mentioned as an aside that the Ginkgo biloba tree is hundreds of millions of years old, and its phenotype has been practically frozen since then – a living fossil.

Of course, this is the same tree that grows ぎんなん (Ginkgo nuts), an East Asian delicacy found in many dishes, 茶碗蒸し (Chawanmushi) for example.

Ginkgo has been around so long, it predates the dinosaurs! And we still eat it! How cool is that. This got me thinking – what are the oldest foods we consume today?

Criteria:

Must be edible by humans

Must be morphologically unchanged since its fossil age

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago

Must be morphologically unchanged since its fossil age

That's interesting. So, genetically it could be significantly changed, but shape-wise, it must appear the same? In any case, I'm thinking certain molluscs might work. Sharks also might fit the bill, altho AFAIK they don't fossilize well. Or, are there other gymnosperms beside ferns and Araucaria that could fit the bill? I suspect so...

Now, feel free to hate on this, but I've found GPT pretty useful for issues like this. Evidently, there's quite a few more candidates.