We may owe wine to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago

Researchers searching for fossilized grape seeds in Colombia, Panama and Peru have found seeds that are between 60 and 19 million years old – and one specimen is from the oldest grape ever found in the Western Hemisphere. The researchers believe the spread of grapes may be a result of environmental changes following the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event.

The oldest known fossilized seeds of the grape family were found in India and are 66 million years old. That’s about the time of the Chicxulub impact that wiped out the dinosaurs and 76 percent of all living species on the planet – but it seems it worked wonders for the grape’s ancestors.

“We always think of the animals, the dinosaurs, because they were the most affected, but the extinction also had a huge impact on the plants,” lead author Fabiany Herrera, assistant curator of paleobotany at the Field Museum in Chicago, said in a statement. “The forest reset in a way that changed the composition of the plants.”

“These are the oldest grapes ever found in this part of the world, and they are several million years younger than the oldest ever found on the other side of the planet,” Herrera continued. “This discovery is important because it shows that grapes really did spread around the world after the extinction of the dinosaurs.”

The team believes that the absence of giant animals may have been a key factor after the extinction. Forests changed and grapes (among other species) found the right opportunity to multiply and spread worldwide.

“Large animals like dinosaurs are known to alter the ecosystems that surround them. We think that large dinosaurs that roamed the forest probably knocked down trees, keeping the forests more open than they are today,” explains Mónica Carvalho, a co-author of the paper and assistant curator at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology.

“It was around this time that we began to discover more plants in the fossil record that used tendrils to climb trees, such as grapes,” Herrera added.

Herrera has been searching for fossilized grapes for some time. This discovery came in 2022 when Herrera and Carvalho were in the Colombian Andes and Carvalho discovered the valuable fossil.

“She looked at me and said, ‘Fabiany, a grape!’ And then I looked at her and just thought, ‘Oh my God.’ It was so exciting,” Herrera explained. “Grapes have an extensive fossil history that starts about 50 million years ago, so I wanted to discover one in South America, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. I’ve been looking for the oldest grape in the Western Hemisphere since I was a student.”

An article with the results was published in the journal Nature Plants.