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Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
41–50 of 108 posts
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#42isn't Sago Palm (Cycas revoluta) highly toxic? i don't think it's edible...
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#43I wonder if there are any fungi that would make that list?
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#44This 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 p…
> 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.
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 b…
If you have a fossil, and break it in half, then do you now have two fossils?
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#46isn'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
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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).
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#48The theory of evolution didn´t work on Horseshow crab?
Darwin did you read that. Maybe nasa should read it too :)
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#49If you don't restrict the list to living things, then salt and water are surely the oldest answers. :)
Hydrogen ions are edible, although usually dissolved in water. Hydrogen ions existed before oxygen or water
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#50Gnetum 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".