Cheers for going extinct: Death of dinosaurs responsible for wine

You can thank the Chicxulub asteroid the next time you have a glass of wine.

According to researchers, the asteroid that led to the extinction of dinosaurs helped the evolution and survival of grapes.

In a discovery described in the journal Nature Plants, researchers found fossilized grape seeds in Colombia, Panama and Peru that range from 60 to 19 million years old.

Without dinosaurs trampling around the Earth, grapes were able grow and evolve over the years.

Researchers say the fossil seeds help show how the grape family spread in the years following the death of the dinosaurs. One of the species represents the earliest known example of plants from the grape family in the Western Hemisphere.

"These are the oldest grapes ever found in this part of the world, and they're a few million years younger than the oldest ones ever found on the other side of the planet," lead author Fabiany Herrera, an assistant curator of paleobotany at the Field Museum in Chicago's Negaunee Integrative Research Center, said in a statement . "This discovery is important because it shows that after the extinction of the dinosaurs, grapes really started to spread across the world."

The earliest known grape seed fossils were found in India and are 66 million years old. Researchers say it's no coincidence that grapes appeared in the fossil record 66 million years ago -- that's around when a huge asteroid hit the Earth, triggering a massive extinction that altered the course of life on the planet.

"We always think about the animals, the dinosaurs, because they were the biggest things to be affected, but the extinction event had a huge impact on plants too," said Herrera. "The forest reset itself, in a way that changed the composition of the plants... In the fossil record, we start to see more plants that use vines to climb up trees, like grapes, around this time."

In 2022, Herrera and co-author Mónica Carvalho were conducting fieldwork in the Colombian Andes when a fossil caught Carvalho's eye. The fossil was in a 60-million-year-old rock, making it not only the first South American grape fossil, but among the world's oldest grape fossils as well.

The fossil seed itself is tiny, but Herrera and Carvalho were able to identify it based on its particular shape, size and other morphological features. Back in the lab, they conducted CT scans showing its internal structure that confirmed its identity. The team named the fossil Lithouva susmanii, "Susman's stone grape."

"This new species is also important because it supports a South American origin of the group in which the common grape vine Vitis evolved," said co-author Gregory Stull of the National Museum of Natural History.

The team conducted further fieldwork in South and Central America, and ultimately discovered nine new species of fossil grapes from Colombia, Panama, and Peru, spanning from 60 to 19 million years old.

"The fossil record tells us that grapes are a very resilient order. They're a group that has suffered a lot of extinction in the Central and South American region, but they also managed to adapt and survive in other parts of the world," said Herrera.