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
Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
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Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#72Hands up who has ever eaten anything from that list!
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.
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#73Four 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.
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#74Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#75Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#76Seeing 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…
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 manifests.
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.
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#77This 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…
T-Rex nuggets. Mmmm...
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#78The only thing I recongized from that list is the Lotus (and I don't eat it, though I remember hearing that some do).
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#79I wonder what megafauna evolved to eat watermelon?
Re: Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't like them, they taste sour: https://youtu.be/FSYE1T5d9jc?si=jQP90-q7QAHnrcJt