Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
January 17, 2022
I just finished Oliver Sacks’ excellent Everything in Its Place. In it, he mentioned as an aside that the Ginkgo biloba tree is hundreds of millions of years old, and its phenotype has been practically frozen since then – a living fossil.
Of course, this is the same tree that grows ぎんなん (Ginkgo nuts), an East Asian delicacy found in many dishes, 茶碗蒸し (Chawanmushi) for example.
Ginkgo has been around so long, it predates the dinosaurs! And we still eat it! How cool is that. This got me thinking – what are the oldest foods we consume today?
Criteria:
- Must be edible by humans
- Must be morphologically unchanged since its fossil age
Photo
Kingdom
Species
Common name
Age (years)
Animalia
Tachypleus tridentatus
Horseshoe crab
Plantae
Ginkgo biloba
Maidenhair nuts
Plantae
Bryoria fremontii
Wila
250M?
Plantae
Cladonia rangiferina
Reindeer lichen
250M?
Plantae
Cycas revoluta
Sago palm
Plantae
Araucaria araucana
Monkey puzzle tree nuts
Plantae
Equisetum arvense
Horsetail
Plantae
Welwitschia
-
Plantae
Osmundastrum cinnamomeum
Cinnamon fern
Plantae
Trapa natans
Water caltrop nuts
Plantae
Nelumbo lutea, Nelumbo nucifera
Lotus
Note: I’m a hobbyist, and not a paleobotanist. Additions and edits are welcome, if I misclassified or missed anything.
Source involved in this report: Read Original Article
