Fun idea. At least one correction for the table: For wila/bryorii fremonti's age of 250mya they cite the "geologic history" of... moss. Wila is a lichen, which is primarily fungal with algal symbiotes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryoria_fremontii And even given an edible moss, the fact that moss existed 250mya would not imply that particular species existed "morphologically unchanged". The "reindeer lichen" entry appears to have the same issue.
Gnetum genom does not have a good fossil record, as is the case for many tropical species, but based on molecular clock data, the genus dates to the late Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (66 mya). Gnetum is a really weird gymnosperm, not a flowering plant, although it does produce fleshy "cones" (strobili). In Indonesia, the seeds are smashed and deep fried to make crisps called "emping".
This is an interesting way to think about plants and animals.
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.
That's because when something becomes a new species is a surprisingly difficult and contentious debate in biology.
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.
> Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix
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.
But as soon as you've gone up from a chicken to the ancestor of a T-Rex, you do indeed find that T-Rexes are in the mix. They look different from what you'd normally think of as a T-Rex, in the same way that they also look different from what you'd normally think of as a chicken.
> 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?
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].
It's pretty tricky to find out, yeah. And new evidence is coming in all the time. All the methods are either floors (a fossil at X date proves a species existed then, but lack of fossils found yet might be inconclusive) or estimates (like molecular clock techniques). Dating fossils themselves (or rather the rocks they're buried in) isn't always easy or possible. For more out-of-the-way species, if anyone has bothered trying to figure out the age it's likely buried in scientific sources that are tricky for novices to find or search, and maybe under debate.
That make wonder, how many fossils there might be at total on earth, and with current trend, how much time would humanity should continue to survive before those remaining will approach zero, if fossil formation as a known rate.
> how many fossils there might be at total on earth
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).
Immense numbers. Quarries destroy them by the (enormous) truckload all the time, unexamined, god knows what cool unknown stuff has been ground up. Entire kinds of rock are basically made of fossils, not even always the really tiny kind (note: fossils can be microscopic!)
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).
I think this might say more about your geographic location than you think :)
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.
Lotus root is pretty common in Chinese and Japanese cuisine. I've had it pickled and in a Sichuan dry pot. It's crunchy and takes on flavors pretty well.
Lotus root is pretty common. A crunchy tuber that keeps its texture after cooking, bland taste, unique visual appeal. I threw some in the last pot of bean chili my family made, and the kids liked it.
'eaten as a delicacy in some parts of Asia' according to Wikipedia, but to be fair OP is only asserting possibilities anyway (the criteria are 1) old enough to have been around for dinosaurs to eat; 2) edible by humans).
"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".
A lot of vegetables are toxic when raw, but safe after cooking. My favorite among these is mandioca, when it’s cooked and then fried. Goes well with churrasco.
I thought avocados were where old food eaten by dinosaurs or at least very large ancient rodents. I guess it doesn't meet the 100 million year old age mark.
It was once thought that giant ground sloths were important for spreading avocados, but that seems to have been a mistake. Anyway, that was long after the dinosaurs. Flowering plants in general were still pretty new by the time the dinosaurs died out. I bet an actual dinosaur never saw an avocado. :)
Seeing my neighbors gathering ginkgo nuts made me curious enough to try them, and I waded right in without understanding the risks! TLDR— they're not a great food source. It's yet another one of those cases where you have to wonder what "delicacy" means.
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.
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.
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.
In university, one year, our building started smelling like there had been a sewage overflow. Pretty soon, everything around started smelling like this - the stores, restaurants, cinema, etc. in central campus was stinking. It was soon found out that the decorative Ginko trees planted in the central part of campus were fruiting (probably for the first time since planting) and the fruit was getting crushed underfoot and carried everywhere. The smell took a few weeks to go away.
Fun idea. At least one correction for the table: For wila/bryorii fremonti's age of 250mya they cite the "geologic history" of... moss. Wila is a lichen, which is primarily fungal with algal symbiotes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryoria_fremontii And even given an edible moss, the fact that moss existed 250mya would not imply that particular species existed "morphologically unchanged". The "reindeer lichen" entry appears to have the same issue.
I wonder what megafauna evolved to eat watermelon?
Four of the eleven on the list are endangered (according to Wikipedia), so if they are still being eaten, they won't be for much longer.
Gnetum genom does not have a good fossil record, as is the case for many tropical species, but based on molecular clock data, the genus dates to the late Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (66 mya). Gnetum is a really weird gymnosperm, not a flowering plant, although it does produce fleshy "cones" (strobili). In Indonesia, the seeds are smashed and deep fried to make crisps called "emping".
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.12705/642.12
If you don't restrict the list to living things, then salt and water are surely the oldest answers. :)
Don't forget dirt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagia#Humans
Hydrogen ions are edible, although usually dissolved in water. Hydrogen ions existed before oxygen or water
Yep, I ensure I ingest a healthy amount of plain old-fashioned protons. Surely among nature's most ancient foods.
This is an interesting way to think about plants and animals.
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.
That's because when something becomes a new species is a surprisingly difficult and contentious debate in biology.
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.
> Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix
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.
But as soon as you've gone up from a chicken to the ancestor of a T-Rex, you do indeed find that T-Rexes are in the mix. They look different from what you'd normally think of as a T-Rex, in the same way that they also look different from what you'd normally think of as a chicken.
T-Rex nuggets. Mmmm...
This is because "species" is a taxonomical category that we invented, but that does not actually map cleanly to reality.
Greg Bear and his fancy pants radio says otherwise.
turns out evolution is analog
> 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?
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].
[1] https://paleobiodb.org/
[2] https://timetree.org/
It's pretty tricky to find out, yeah. And new evidence is coming in all the time. All the methods are either floors (a fossil at X date proves a species existed then, but lack of fossils found yet might be inconclusive) or estimates (like molecular clock techniques). Dating fossils themselves (or rather the rocks they're buried in) isn't always easy or possible. For more out-of-the-way species, if anyone has bothered trying to figure out the age it's likely buried in scientific sources that are tricky for novices to find or search, and maybe under debate.
That make wonder, how many fossils there might be at total on earth, and with current trend, how much time would humanity should continue to survive before those remaining will approach zero, if fossil formation as a known rate.
> how many fossils there might be at total on earth
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).
If you have a fossil, and break it in half, then do you now have two fossils?
Immense numbers. Quarries destroy them by the (enormous) truckload all the time, unexamined, god knows what cool unknown stuff has been ground up. Entire kinds of rock are basically made of fossils, not even always the really tiny kind (note: fossils can be microscopic!)
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).
Hands up who has ever eaten anything from that list!
I think this might say more about your geographic location than you think :)
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.
> I think this might say more about your geographic location than you think
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.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welwitschia
Lotus root is pretty common in Chinese and Japanese cuisine. I've had it pickled and in a Sichuan dry pot. It's crunchy and takes on flavors pretty well.
We use it in cuisines from India, particularly from Tamil nadu, as well. Lotus root, seeds, the petals, pretty much all.
my wife and I regularly eat lotus root, it's quite delicious and common in chinese cooking. the others not so much.
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.
Apparently monkey puzzle nuts are great, I keep meaning to find some they do seem to seed around here sometimes but they are hard to reach.
Water caltrop nuts are common in Taiwan, very nutty and good for meat soups.
Whoever smelled a ginkgo fruit and said "let's eat this" !
Our sense of smell also evolved in the past couple thousand years. And the further back you go, the hungrier our ancestor will be.
I need to get food at the market, not wait for it to fall into a trap or fight it to death.
Fiddleheads from ferns are available at farmer's markets in the spring in my area, though not from the cinnamon fern specifically.
I'm having trouble finding sources for other specific fern species, though many ferns have been around for hundreds of millions of years.
I used to get them at Whole Foods in Nashua, NH. They're quite seasonal so I'd always grab some if I see em.
Fern fiddleheads aren't bad if you get them at the right time, but I wouldn't go out of my way to eat them.
Lotus root is pretty common. A crunchy tuber that keeps its texture after cooking, bland taste, unique visual appeal. I threw some in the last pot of bean chili my family made, and the kids liked it.
People eat Horseshoe Crabs? No way, but their precious blood give me
'eaten as a delicacy in some parts of Asia' according to Wikipedia, but to be fair OP is only asserting possibilities anyway (the criteria are 1) old enough to have been around for dinosaurs to eat; 2) edible by humans).
Technically they eat the roe. Horseshoe crabs have very little meat and it’s so tough as to be practically inedible.
The only thing I recongized from that list is the Lotus (and I don't eat it, though I remember hearing that some do).
Reindeer lichen is not a moss (Wiki link), or even a Plantae...
Not sure the same crocodiles and sharks we have today were food back than, but current ones are delicious.
Birds are dinosaurs, and we eat a lot of chicken.
True. And all land vertebrates are technically fish.
They share a common ancestor with ancient fish, yes. Land mammals also share a common ancestor with starfish. That doesn't make them starfish.
The "humans are fish" idea comes from cladistics.
"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".
isn't Sago Palm (Cycas revoluta) highly toxic? i don't think it's edible...
It's a staple food in some cultures. It needs preprocessing, but people have been doing that for a while
A lot of vegetables are toxic when raw, but safe after cooking. My favorite among these is mandioca, when it’s cooked and then fried. Goes well with churrasco.
Aren’t sea cucumbers 400M+ years old and common in Chinese cuisine?
No fiddle heads?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddlehead
I wonder if there are any fungi that would make that list?
Avocado. I heard it was dinosaur food. Read an article somewhere that says Avacdo trees think that dinosaurs are still around.
Funnily enough they're toxic to all remaining dinosaurs.
> Avocado. I heard it was dinosaur food.
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.
A great related article on mammalian megafauna and plants. https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-...
I thought avocados were where old food eaten by dinosaurs or at least very large ancient rodents. I guess it doesn't meet the 100 million year old age mark.
It was once thought that giant ground sloths were important for spreading avocados, but that seems to have been a mistake. Anyway, that was long after the dinosaurs. Flowering plants in general were still pretty new by the time the dinosaurs died out. I bet an actual dinosaur never saw an avocado. :)
Edit: transcript of a video about the sloth/avocado thing: https://nerdfighteria.info/v/jpcBgYYFS8o
I take Gingo three times a week, and eat Horseshoe Crab a few times a year.
Meat
Which one?
Maybe pythons - some types of crocodile/alligators. But that's very region specific.
Sharks as well.
Sturgeon. Maybe lamprey (I've never tried it)
Molluscs? Snails have been around a very long time in one form or another.
Oysters and other bivalves too...
Catshark maybe, although I don't know if that species in particular is old enough.
The theory of evolution didn´t work on Horseshow crab? Darwin did you read that. Maybe nasa should read it too :)
Evolution rarely escape local maxima.
Seeing my neighbors gathering ginkgo nuts made me curious enough to try them, and I waded right in without understanding the risks! TLDR— they're not a great food source. It's yet another one of those cases where you have to wonder what "delicacy" means.
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.
What's up with the ginkgo hate on this story?
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.
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.
> contact dermatitis
Lots of food is like this, for example mangoes.
In university, one year, our building started smelling like there had been a sewage overflow. Pretty soon, everything around started smelling like this - the stores, restaurants, cinema, etc. in central campus was stinking. It was soon found out that the decorative Ginko trees planted in the central part of campus were fruiting (probably for the first time since planting) and the fruit was getting crushed underfoot and carried everywhere. The smell took a few weeks to go away.
I eat foods with long history of co-evolution and domestication.
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.
"We still eat today" vs. "Someone consumed this today" is disingenuous at best.