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.
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.
I'm having trouble finding sources for other specific fern species, though many ferns have been around for hundreds of millions of years.
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.
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.
Lots of food is like this, for example mangoes.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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).
Edit: transcript of a video about the sloth/avocado thing: https://nerdfighteria.info/v/jpcBgYYFS8o
munificent•1h ago
procaryote•7m ago