When Dinosaurs invented Fruit

摘要

ACHAPTER THAT I READ IN ROBERT T. BARKERSThe Dinosaur Heresies, titled "When Dinosaurs Invented Flowers" (1) piqued my curiosity. My thinking was: Okay, from flowers come fruit. So how, then, could dinosaurs have brought about flowering plants and the delicious fruits that we all enjoy?Bakker, a dinosaur paleontologist, in this book was bent on presenting evidence for the then-controversial but now-accepted theory that dinosaurs did not become completely extinct. That one line of them, the maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs, evolved intobirds.This news gladdens my heart! Every time I encounter a California scrub jay or a Stell-er's jay, I delight in reflecting that their ancestors were terrifying creatures that hunted and killed for meat... but I digress.His researches in dino paleontology triggered some of his interesting insights into paleobotany. In the fascinating chapter mentioned above, Bakker reminds us that while herbivores wish to eat plants, plants do not wish to be eaten, and that "the warfarebetween plants and herbivores beganon land 400 million years ago," long before flowers. Dinosaurs captured the niches on land 200 million years ago starting with the Triassic Period, followed by the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, together the three great ages of dinosaurs during the Mesozoic Era. Plants back then were gymnosperms — conifers, cycads, ferns and other such non-flowering plants. No blooming flowers. No succulent fruit. All dull shades of green.