[HN Gopher] Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat toda...
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Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
Author : simonebrunozzi
Score : 86 points
Date : 2026-02-19 15:30 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (borischerny.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (borischerny.com)
| munificent wrote:
| If you don't restrict the list to living things, then salt and
| water are surely the oldest answers. :)
| procaryote wrote:
| Hydrogen ions are edible, although usually dissolved in water.
| Hydrogen ions existed before oxygen or water
| austinjp wrote:
| Yep, I ensure I ingest a healthy amount of plain old-
| fashioned protons. Surely among nature's most ancient foods.
| siriaan wrote:
| Don't forget dirt -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagia#Humans
| kleiba wrote:
| Hands up who has ever eaten anything from that list!
| mgh2 wrote:
| Water caltrop nuts are common in Taiwan, very nutty and good
| for meat soups.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Lotus root is pretty common in Chinese and Japanese cuisine.
| I've had it pickled and in a Sichuan dry pot. It's crunchy and
| takes on flavors pretty well.
| arunc wrote:
| We use it in cuisines from India, particularly from Tamil
| nadu, as well. Lotus root, seeds, the petals, pretty much
| all.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Lotus root is pretty common. A crunchy tuber that keeps its
| texture after cooking, bland taste, unique visual appeal. I
| threw some in the last pot of bean chili my family made, and
| the kids liked it.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I think this might say more about your geographic location than
| you think :)
|
| 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.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > I think this might say more about your geographic location
| than you think
|
| 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.
|
| 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welwitschia
| zdragnar wrote:
| Fern fiddleheads aren't bad if you get them at the right time,
| but I wouldn't go out of my way to eat them.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Whoever smelled a ginkgo fruit and said "let's eat this" !
| rbanffy wrote:
| Our sense of smell also evolved in the past couple thousand
| years. And the further back you go, the hungrier our ancestor
| will be.
|
| I need to get food at the market, not wait for it to fall
| into a trap or fight it to death.
| magneticnorth wrote:
| Fiddleheads from ferns are available at farmer's markets in the
| spring in my area, though not from the cinnamon fern
| specifically.
|
| I'm having trouble finding sources for other specific fern
| species, though many ferns have been around for hundreds of
| millions of years.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I used to get them at Whole Foods in Nashua, NH. They're
| quite seasonal so I'd always grab some if I see em.
| heathrow83829 wrote:
| my wife and I regularly eat lotus root, it's quite delicious
| and common in chinese cooking. the others not so much.
|
| 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.
| justincormack wrote:
| 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.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Seeing 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 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.
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| > contact dermatitis
|
| Lots of food is like this, for example mangoes.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I eat foods with long history of co-evolution and
| domestication.
|
| 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.
| groos wrote:
| In university, one year, our building started smelling like
| there had been a sewage overflow. Pretty soon, everything
| around started smelling like this - the stores, restaurants,
| cinema, etc. in central campus was stinking. It was soon found
| out that the decorative Ginko trees planted in the central part
| of campus were fruiting (probably for the first time since
| planting) and the fruit was getting crushed underfoot and
| carried everywhere. The smell took a few weeks to go away.
| avadodin wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| ge96 wrote:
| People eat Horseshoe Crabs? No way, but their precious blood give
| me
| OJFord wrote:
| 'eaten as a delicacy in some parts of Asia' according to
| Wikipedia, but to be fair OP is only asserting _possibilities_
| anyway (the criteria are 1) old enough to have been around for
| dinosaurs to eat; 2) _edible_ by humans).
| throwup238 wrote:
| Technically they eat the roe. Horseshoe crabs have very little
| meat and it's so tough as to be practically inedible.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| "We still eat today" vs. "Someone consumed this today" is
| disingenuous at best.
| notorandit wrote:
| Meat
| plaguna wrote:
| Which one?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Maybe pythons - some types of crocodile/alligators. But
| that's very region specific.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Sharks as well.
| icameron wrote:
| Sturgeon. Maybe lamprey (I've never tried it)
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Molluscs? Snails have been around a very long time in one
| form or another.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Oysters and other bivalves too...
| seszett wrote:
| Catshark maybe, although I don't know if that species in
| particular is old enough.
| magneticnorth wrote:
| This 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.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> 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?_
|
| 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].
|
| [1] https://paleobiodb.org/
|
| [2] https://timetree.org/
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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
| process.
| b112 wrote:
| Greg Bear and his fancy pants radio says otherwise.
| usrnm wrote:
| > 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| turns out evolution is analog
| technothrasher wrote:
| This is because "species" is a taxonomical category that we
| invented, but that does not actually map cleanly to reality.
| vardump wrote:
| T-Rex nuggets. Mmmm...
| andrewflnr wrote:
| 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 trying to figure out the age it's likely buried in
| scientific sources that are tricky for novices to find or
| search, and maybe under debate.
| psychoslave wrote:
| 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.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> 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 but we produce nearly a million tons a year in
| diatomaceous earth).
| hnlmorg wrote:
| If you have a fossil, and break it in half, then do you
| now have two fossils?
| bubblewand wrote:
| 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).
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| No fiddle heads?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddlehead
| smm11 wrote:
| I take Gingo three times a week, and eat Horseshoe Crab a few
| times a year.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| I thought avocados were where old food eaten by dinosaurs or at
| least very large ancient rodents. I guess it doesn't meet the 100
| million year old age mark.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| It was once thought that giant ground sloths were important for
| spreading avocados, but that seems to have been a mistake.
| Anyway, that was long after the dinosaurs. Flowering plants in
| general were still pretty new by the time the dinosaurs died
| out. I bet an actual dinosaur never saw an avocado. :)
|
| Edit: transcript of a video about the sloth/avocado thing:
| https://nerdfighteria.info/v/jpcBgYYFS8o
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Fun idea. At least one correction for the table: For wila/bryorii
| fremonti's age of 250mya they cite the "geologic history" of...
| moss. Wila is a lichen, which is primarily fungal with algal
| symbiotes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryoria_fremontii And
| even given an edible moss, the fact that moss existed 250mya
| would not imply that particular species existed "morphologically
| unchanged". The "reindeer lichen" entry appears to have the same
| issue.
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| Reindeer lichen is not a moss (Wiki link), or even a Plantae...
| smoll wrote:
| isn't Sago Palm (Cycas revoluta) highly toxic? i don't think it's
| edible...
| procaryote wrote:
| It's a staple food in some cultures. It needs preprocessing,
| but people have been doing that for a while
| rbanffy wrote:
| A lot of vegetables are toxic when raw, but safe after cooking.
| My favorite among these is mandioca, when it's cooked and then
| fried. Goes well with churrasco.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I wonder if there are any fungi that would make that list?
| trilogic wrote:
| The theory of evolution didn't work on Horseshow crab? Darwin did
| you read that. Maybe nasa should read it too :)
| rbanffy wrote:
| Evolution rarely escape local maxima.
| whyenot wrote:
| Gnetum 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".
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.12705/642.12
| rbanffy wrote:
| Not sure the same crocodiles and sharks we have today were food
| back than, but current ones are delicious.
| zkmon wrote:
| Avocado. I heard it was dinosaur food. Read an article somewhere
| that says Avacdo trees think that dinosaurs are still around.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Funnily enough they're toxic to all remaining dinosaurs.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > 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.
| tgbugs wrote:
| A great related article on mammalian megafauna and plants.
| https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-
| miss-...
| golem14 wrote:
| Aren't sea cucumbers 400M+ years old and common in Chinese
| cuisine?
| kazinator wrote:
| Birds are dinosaurs, and we eat a lot of chicken.
| gpt5 wrote:
| True. And all land vertebrates are technically fish.
| whyenot wrote:
| They share a common ancestor with ancient fish, yes. Land
| mammals also share a common ancestor with starfish. That
| doesn't make them starfish.
| eesmith wrote:
| 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".
| femto wrote:
| Four 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| The only thing I recongized from that list is the Lotus (and I
| don't eat it, though I remember hearing that some do).
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