Meat
Which one?
Catshark maybe, although I don't know if that species in particular is old enough.
Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
61–70 of 108 posts
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#62This 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…
turns out evolution is analog
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#64Avocado. I heard it was dinosaur food. Read an article somewhere that says Avacdo trees think that dinosaurs are still around.
> 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-...
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#65This 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…
This is because "species" is a taxonomical category that we invented, but that does not actually map cleanly to reality.
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#66Birds are dinosaurs, and we eat a lot of chicken.
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#67If 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
Yep, I ensure I ingest a healthy amount of plain old-fashioned protons. Surely among nature's most ancient foods.
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#68Birds are dinosaurs, and we eat a lot of chicken.
True. And all land vertebrates are technically fish.
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#69Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".