How dinosaurs, fungi, and plants evolved together
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Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 528th episode, we're talking about plants and fungi and how dinosaurs interacted with them. I know some people say fungi, but we're going with fungi.

Because I'm a fun guy. I was just going to make a joke like that. It's like the most common fungus joke, but it's a good one. Fungus slash dad joke, yeah. We also have dinosaur of the day, Jehorneus, which was a fruit-eating dinosaur, bird, but you know, dinosaur. Fits with the theme. It does. And we have two fun facts for this episode. The first is that there are giant sinkholes with ancient forests.

And the second is there are carnivorous fungi. Really? Yeah. I knew there were carnivorous plants, but I didn't know about carnivorous fungi. I guess anything can be a carnivore. That sounds very Last of Us-y, although they were more parasitic. I guess that's sort of like a carnivore. I don't know. Interesting. I'll tell you more on the fun fact. Okay.

Also, a reminder, we are still on parental leave. We're recording this early before we're having our second baby, so we're expecting her soon. Hopefully she's been around for a while at this point. Yes. If everything goes according to plan. It was a little too difficult for us this time around with the toddler and the incoming newborn to record weekly episodes. So we are trying a new thing where we're going bi-weekly while on parental leave.

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All one word, lowercase, although I don't think the case matters. And thank you for supporting us and our growing family. Well, the family should be expanded by the time this episode comes out. So getting into it, plants and fungi. Years ago, I remember reading about how dinosaurs may have hallucinated from eating fungi. And that got me thinking about the relationship between fungi and dinosaurs, as well as plants and dinosaurs. So here we are.

Took me, I don't know how many years to get here. I want to thank Common Descent for sharing some sources from their fungal episodes. We used a couple of the same sources, but don't worry, this isn't a rehash of their episode. You can check out their show for even more information on plants and fungi. But being a dinosaur show, our focus is on dinosaurs and how they interact with plants and fungi and their effect on each other.

So what is fungi? Well, I'm going to start with the fungi because that's kind of how this idea for this episode came about. And fungi is pretty cool. Pretty fun. Right. It comes in all shapes and sizes.

Fungus that forms mushrooms is microscopic. To quote from the book Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines by Nicholas Money, which was published by Princeton University Press, quote, "...for almost all of their lives, these organisms exist as spidery colonies of tiny threads called hyphae. Each thread, or hypha, is ten times thinner than a human hair. These filaments elongate and branch as they feed in soil and go about the process of rotting wood."

The colony of branching hyphae is a mycelium. When this mycelium has grown over a large area and absorbed enough food, it reverses direction and flows to the surface, where the threads merge to form mushrooms. Mushrooms with gills are the fruit bodies or sex organs of fungi that mist the air with spores. As the urge to reproduce becomes an imperative, the fungus moves from below ground to above ground, changing its role from feeding to fruiting in the wondrous cycle of its life.

That's a very poetic description of how fungus lives the life cycle. It is. Yeah, I enjoyed that book. And I just want to mention, we've got a lot of sources for this episode. The main sources that we use, though, will be included in the show notes if you want to read more.

What I like about that is it emphasizes that fungus isn't just mushrooms. Yes. Because I think growing up, I always thought a fungus, that's a mushroom. But really, the mushroom is just like the mating phase of the mushroom, which isn't the most appetizing when you first learn that fact that it's basically like the sex organ of the mushroom. Right.

But I still eat mushrooms. Yes, they have a good umami flavor to them. Sauté them in a little butter and garlic. It's great. You cook them and then it's fine.

And wash them. Yeah. You don't have to worry about it. Well, so yeah, most fungi never form a mushroom and they're microscopic throughout their feeding and reproductive stages. Think of, in addition to, you know, sauteing and washing and all that, like yeasts used in brewing and baking or cheese making or different kinds of molds. I never realized yeast was a fungus. Yeah. Yeah.

As you can imagine, it's hard to find fossilized fungi because it's so delicate. Yeah, I'm guessing the spores are probably where you're getting most of the details. Depends. One study in 2016 found that it's usually in amber. Hmm.

Which makes sense. Amber can preserve a lot of small things. Plus, your description was talking about how fungus is mostly decomposing wood and amber forms on the surface of wood. So you could imagine that if a tree is producing a lot of sap, it could be because it's not doing so well. Maybe it has some fungus in it. And so they're actually maybe

Maybe the perfect place to capture it. Unlike dinosaur fossils, which aren't spending a lot of time in and on wood. Fungus is there pretty much all the time. Yes. Oh, also, according to that book, the entire human body is affected by fungi because fungal cells feed on our scalps, they grow in our guts, and they help control bacteria. Yeah.

Another way that I've heard recently is that it's possible that the reason that we developed a higher body temperature is basically to ward off fungus. Yes. Because fungus mostly lives in cooler environments. And so the higher body temperature that we have makes it harder for fungus to live inside us. Harmful fungus. The ones that cause fungal infections. Yeah, exactly. Yes. And you tend to get those right when it's like,

your foot is wet and cold or something for a long time. Yeah. Rather than when you're at your normal body temperature. Well, not just me. I'm not saying you're constantly affected by funguses. Thank you. I just wanted to clarify.

I don't think either of us have gotten a fungal infection in a very long time, if ever. Knock on wood. Knock on wood, yeah. There is also just one more note on that. I remember there was a recent study saying that human body temperatures have been declining a little bit over recent years, and that may lead to more fungal infections because we'll have less of a defense from our higher body temperatures.

And fungal infections can affect all sorts of things. It can irritate your skin, disintegrate toenails, can be deadly in some cases, cause things like athlete's foot or allergies, asthma. It can even infect the brain.

Yeah, the toenail one. I have an uncle who has what he calls fungus toe, and I was very excited about it when I was a kid. It's just like a giant yellow nail. Oh. Yeah. So exciting. I was very excited. I'm still kind of excited by it. It's just so interesting. Anyway, going back to the mushrooms, some mushrooms are poisonous, but they can also have psychoactive properties.

Why do mushrooms make psychedelics? According to that book, quote, insect attraction seems the best reason for a mushroom to make psychedelics, though the evidence for this is slim. Experiments suggest that flies, like humans, experience mood elevation on psilocybin, end quote. This is all very speculative. So the flies go there to get a little buzz going. They buzz around for a buzz. Mm-hmm.

Anyway, there's about 100,000 species of fungi that's recognized, but there might be more than 5 million species of fungi on Earth. That's a lot. There are more than 10 times more fungi than angiosperms. Angiosperms are flowering plants, which we'll get into a little bit. But yeah, that's a lot. So getting into hallucinogenic fungi. Ergot, which is a fungi used in medicine, is also a toxin and a hallucinogen.

The genus is Claviceps. There's 50 known species. They're mostly found in tropical areas.

They contain lysergic acid, which Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman synthesized in 1938 and eventually ingested and learned of its psychedelic effects as LSD. Oh, I didn't realize that that was originally synthesized or extracted from a mushroom. Yeah. Or maybe not a mushroom, a fungus. A fungus, yeah, because not all fungi are mushrooms. Yeah. But from what I understand, he had a lot of trips. Mm-hmm.

Now ergot grows on ears of rye and related cereal and forage plants, so they get into grains and seeds. It's a parasite and it produces a sclerodium with a black to purple-black rind,

And when the grain is made into bread or eaten, it causes ergotism, known as St. Anthony's fire or devil's curse, because you get convulsions, vomiting, hallucinations, and pain that feels like you're on fire. Oh boy, that is rough. Yes. Luckily, it doesn't happen much today because there's just a lot of careful screening of grains.

And when it does happen, it's mostly poisoning farm animals like cows, horses, pigs, and chickens. Because they probably don't get as carefully screened food as we do. Yes. So this is a parasitic fungus. Yes. But it's not all bad because some of its compounds have been used to treat migraines and help with childbirth.

There's a 2015 study that found that erga and grasses evolved together. This is based on an amber fossil from Myanmar from about 100 million years ago when the earliest flowering plants and grasses were starting to evolve. And as a quick note that I feel like I always have to say when we bring up amber found in Myanmar, this study happened before the warning not to research Burmese amber.

There's going to be a lot of that. Actually, all the studies we mentioned about amber found in Myanmar was done before that warning. So they found evidence of this fungus on a grass floret. It was infecting the grass. And they found a fungal sclerodium similar to the genus Claviceps, the ergot. So they named a new fungus, Paleoclaviceps parasiticus. You don't need much explanation on what that means. Yes. Okay.

And sclerodium, just FYI, it's a compact mass. It's hard and dark. It contains food reserves and it can be dormant for long periods of time for survival purposes. So it's basically a dense tissue mass. These fossils were dehydrated quickly and this find helps show that grasses were established by the early mid-Cretaceous. Now mammals, birds, and dinosaurs ate grasses.

And it seems likely that a dinosaur could have eaten this, but it's unclear what effect it would have on a large dinosaur. Because it did have psychotropic compounds, which means that mammals, birds, and dinosaurs, they might have eaten it, had some side effects. But with modern animals, farm animals that eat ergot-infected seeds, they tend to stop eating it after a few feedings. So the compounds are a deterrent to them, and it could be the same for dinosaurs. It was like a repellent. Mm-hmm.

So that could be a better explanation for why these psychoactive compounds evolved if dinosaurs and or mammals stopped eating them when they involved the compound. That's a pretty big advantage. That's true because then it can just keep going on its business. Yep. In general, things don't like being eaten with a couple exceptions like seeds. Yes. Yes. The plants have their own strategies. Yeah.

Now we know at least some dinosaurs ate grass because a 2008 study found sauropods at a Myanmar amber site, hatchlings to adults, that ate in the herb and shrub zones where grass could have grown. There was also a study in 2005 that found grass in coprolites, fossilized poop, of a Cretaceous sauropod.

That was from the Lametta formation, which is in India. So it's probably from the titanosaur Isisaurus. And if that name sounds familiar, it was featured in Prehistoric Planet 2 and it was our Dinosaur of the Day in episode 444. It's medium-sized, about 59 feet or 18 meters long, Isisaurus is. I'm going to have to update my trivia about dinosaurs where I say dinosaurs didn't eat grass.

I guess some of them did once in a while, at least. Yes. Because there weren't really grasslands in the Mesozoic the way we have them today, like huge expanses of grass. But I guess there was enough grass around that they could eat some. Those dinosaurs were opportunists. Especially when you're getting new teeth all the time, you don't have to worry about all their silica grinding away your teeth. That'd be nice.

Well, in the study, they found plant pathogens that caused leaf spot and red rot disease. It made black spots on the leaves. And they found those leaves in the coprolite. So the fungi in the coprolites shows that the dinosaur ate the leaves. And this may mean that Isisaurus used its long slender neck to browse trees like modern camels and giraffes. There was another fungus in the coprolite that got there after the dinosaur pooped.

That type of fungus is found in tropical or subtropical climates, which may mean that Isisaurus lived in a tropical or subtropical environment. The things you learn from fungi. Yeah, right? I didn't think about that before, that you could figure out based on fungus on coprolite where the coprolite was dropped or what the weather was like. Well, you can learn a lot from coprolites because...

There's a 2007 study by Karen Shin that found wood in the coprolites of the hadrosaur myosaur, the good mother lizard. They're found in the two medicine formation from the late Cretaceous about 80 to 74 million years ago. And they're irregular in shape. And there's a lot of fragmented conifer wood.

that dung beetles burrowed or tunneled into the copper whites. That's why it's a little fragmented. Now, based on the large size and the fibrous contents and being found near bones and eggshells, it makes it seem likely it came from myosora. And it seems like it was eaten intentionally because there's a lot of wood in the poop and there's no small twig fragments. So it didn't just accidentally eat it while eating leaves. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Yes, and that wood seems to be decomposing from fungus. So it could be that myasora ate decomposing wood and maybe got the resources or nutrients released after the fungal attack. And maybe myasora ate that wood seasonally and rotting wood could have been a big part of its diet, which would be useful if there aren't grasses or other angiosperms around.

Getting creative. Makes a lot of sense because there isn't a ton of calcium around in different plants that you'd be eating, but shells of animals are often around. Oh, well, in this case, it's nutrients from the wood that's decomposing.

Thinking of a different study. Yes. There are studies found that show that different dinosaurs ate calcium. Yeah. And that maybe they were eating rotting wood because there were things in it eating the rotting wood that had calcium. In this case, based on the eggshells being around, that helps show that the copper likely came from myosora. So I can see the confusion, but we're talking about the wood specifically.

Although the last thing I want to bring up is there's evidence of fungi in dinosaur eggshells from the late Cretaceous of what's now China. There was a study in 2008 and it had needle ribbon and silk like filaments. So perhaps this fungi was parasitic and invaded those dinosaur shells before they fossilized. Oh, okay.

Makes you wonder if there was still a dinosaur inside it, a living dinosaur inside it, or if it made it in, you know, just after something went wrong. For the dinosaur's sake, I hope it was after something went wrong. Me too. Eggs are sort of like our skin in that there are a bunch of different layers and sort of antimicrobial features to it and ways to sort of repel things that you don't want getting inside, but still letting air and moisture through. Yes. But occasionally it fails.

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So speaking of fungal infections, a study in 2008 found fossil evidence of a parasitic fungus. They named it Paleo-Ufeo-Corticeps cockaphagus from Myanmar amber from the Cretaceous. And it had two whip-like fruiting bodies coming from the head of a male scale insect.

a type of small herbivorous insect. So this fungus infected the insect. And then grew two fruits on its head? I think so. Sounds a little bit horrifying. Yeah, that sounds like a movie.

You were saying earlier, Garrett, that humans, we are warm enough to help fight off fungal infections. Dinosaurs may have also developed endothermy, basically being warm-blooded to also fight off fungal infections. There's an estimated 5 million species of fungus, but only a few hundred can infect humans. So that's good news for us. That is good news. It's mostly because fungus won't grow at the higher body temperatures of mammals and birds, but it can thrive in ectotherms, the cold-blooded animals.

And fungus may have driven about 200 frog species to extinction. It's like the one thing that gets these cold-blooded animals. We were talking about mass extinctions in some recent I Know Paleo episodes, and it kept being like, oh yeah, all the invertebrates and the cold-blooded animals seem to do better. But then the fungus got them. The fungus comes for them.

And you were also talking about one of those that fungus seems to do really well after mass extinctions. At least briefly. Yeah. While the plants are recovering.

But yeah, since dinosaurs and mammals are warm-blooded, they and we are just much more resistant to fungus. Yeah. I also remember some studies talking about just how warm-blooded dinosaurs were. And like birds, a lot of them are warmer-blooded than us even. You can almost call them hot-blooded because a lot of them were above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in temperature. So you could see that really being a good way to get rid of all that fungus that might have been around them. Yes.

It's pretty amazing all the things you have to fend yourself against. Yeah. It does make you wonder how much of their fungal resistance would have been a factor in them taking over from some of the other reptiles in the Triassic and early Jurassic. Good point. That's a really hard one to test. Oh, yes. Even figuring out what was going on with plants and dinosaurs is kind of difficult.

Which brings me to plants. Like that segue? It was very good. There's two major groups of plants, gymnosperms and angiosperms. The difference between them is in the seeds. Not the flowers? Not the flowers. Seeds are basically fertilized plant eggs. That's a really weird way to think about seeds. Fertilized plant eggs. I thought it was fun.

The word gymnosperm means naked seed, and usually gymnosperms grow seeds in cones, and then the cones are packed with protein, although some have a fleshy, fruit-like structure. The word angiosperm means enclosed seed, so that's the difference. About 80% of plants today are flowering plants, angiosperms.

And the earliest flowering plants are found in the form of pollen. So angiosperms have their fertilized plant egg enclosed in something, whereas gymnosperms have them just out in the air? Usually, yes. Although they sometimes have fruit-like structures. I guess that, I mean, nothing is 100% right. Yeah. Just like with dinosaur groups. And there's always one that goes off the beaten path and looks like the other group. There's definitely nuances. Yeah.

Interestingly, in a 1978 Nature paper, Bob Bakker suggested that dinosaurs invented flowers.

The idea is that large herbivores ate cycads and conifers in the Jurassic and early Cretaceous, and they just ate a lot of plants. They could spread those flowering plants by clearing away the gymnosperm competition and allowing the flowering plants to thrive. That's no longer the current thinking. And there's actually no strong evidence the dinosaurs had to do with the origin or spread of flowers. It seems more like an insect thing than a dinosaur thing. Yes. Bugs, insects...

probably spread angiosperms through pollen and things like that. But we do know dinosaurs ate angiosperms at the end of the Cretaceous. Dinosaurs also ate gymnosperms. And grass. Yeah. Although I guess... Grass is an angiosperm. Yes.

A 2008 study found that sauropods probably went after conifers and ferns for nutritional and energy needs. Really? Because I remember the study, oh, that was a little bit later of a study, showing that horsetails had the highest amount of energy of all the available food. Again, plants are tricky. Maybe it depends on the environment, what was available. Yeah, that makes sense. Horsetails don't grow everywhere, that's for sure. Yeah. Dinosaurs did affect how gymnosperms evolved. Conifer cones in particular were an important food source.

And insects also ate them and played a role in seed cone changes. There was a 2011 study that looked at changes in the anatomy of conifer cones over the last 300 million years, and they found the cones containing seeds started increasing the amount of protective tissue around their seeds in the middle of the Jurassic. They became large, well-protected cones like in monkey puzzle trees.

The seed size in conifers has been the same, so only that protective cone has changed. A 2024 study found fossilized seeds in the stomach of Longeterrax, an early Cretaceous bird. Before this, we thought that this bird ate fish or insects. There were two specimens, though, found with plant remains that shows that it ate fruit or fruit-like things. And Longeterrax lived about 120 million years ago in the early Cretaceous.

It's the size of a blue jay. It had a long skull and teeth at the tip of the beak. It had strong teeth. The teeth and pointy beak could be a weapon to fight each other. It had thick tooth enamel. Actually, it was the same thickness as allosaurus teeth, 50 microns. Technically, it ate flesh-covered seeds because they came from gymnosperms, conifers and ginkgos, not angiosperms, the flowering plants.

But we're still, just for making things easier on us, we're going to call it fruit. It lived in a temperate climate, so it didn't eat the fruit all year. And maybe it ate insects and other things when the fruit wasn't around. Most dinosaurs, though, probably ate ferns and conifers. The shape of some teeth suggests they ate leaves and twigs.

Like I said, though, there is evidence that dinosaurs ate flowering plants. And going back to coprolite, there are two coprolites found in Utah that have fragments of angiosperm wood from the late Cretaceous about 75 million years ago. One coprolite's about 12 inches long by 10 inches wide or 30 by 25 centimeters. Like dinner plate size? Yeah. It's too big to be from anything but a dinosaur was the conclusion. This was presented in 2015 at SVP.

There was also a 2010 study that found gut contents of a small early Cretaceous ankylosaur found with fossilized angiosperm fruit. That ankylosaur was minmi. Nice. Australia, coming through with ankylosaur fossilized poop. Yay, coprolites. Oh, you said gut contents. I guess that's a cololite or bromelite. Yes.

I don't know what's more exciting, gut contents or coprolites. I like gut contents better because it's usually inside an animal that you can identify. Whereas coprolites, like you were saying, it's like, well, this was really big, so it's probably from a dinosaur. Right. It's usually the best you can do.

That's true. Except with that myosora where there were eggshells around, so they made an inference. Yeah, but you're right. It is a lot harder to know what made it. Coprolites, though, can really preserve stuff in a way that a lot of times gut contents doesn't. Like you get entire beetles like perfectly preserved and things like that. That's true. You don't usually get that if it's just in the gut contents. That's true. Well, going back to plants.

When we talk about plants today, there's a good chance we're talking about angiosperms, the flowering plants. There's some estimates that flowering plants are 90% of all plants. You mean...

covered seed plants yes not flowering plants so to kind of expand on that again angiosperms are different from gymnosperms by having an ovary which acts like a container to protect the seeds inside and it becomes a fruit so i guess plants and fungi have that in common where we kind of eat their reproductive organs yeah or kind of eating the eggs of the plants yeah a little different

If you're eating the flowers, then you'd be eating the reproductive organs, which you can. You can. Some of them, not all of them. Right. Dandelions. Anyway, this makes it hard to tell what's an angiosperm sometimes as a fossil. Also, some gymnosperms have a flower-like appearance with petal-like leaves. So it can get confusing. Mosses were the first plants some 425 million years ago.

Then furs, ginkgos, conifers, and others. And then the flowering plants came. But it's hard to tell when angiosperms first came about. The oldest uncontested fossil angiosperms are from the early Cretaceous, about 130 to 125 million years ago. Michael Benton said that there was an angiosperm terrestrial revolution in the Cretaceous because they spread then and they dominated by the late Cretaceous where ferns and other plants used to be.

A 2024 phylogeny study found an, quote, explosive early phase of diversification of extant lineages during the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods. One of the oldest families of flowering plants is Chloranthaceae. It's a relict group. It's one of the early diverging lineages in angiosperms. And these are woody or weakly woody plants. Some are used in traditional medicine.

There's no woody stems above the ground. There's no petals. The fruits can be droops, like stone fruits, such as mangoes, cherries, peaches, though this type of plant has its own droop fruits or berries. They're not the first flowers. The first ones I believe are water lilies. They're from an older lineage.

But they may be the first angiosperms to spread into open habitats around the world and away from forests. And they started in the early Cretaceous. So it's not actually mangoes, it's just that they had fruit similar to what you find with a mango? Yeah. Mangoes is just an example of a stone fruit. Okay. They had their own fruit.

Charles Darwin called angiosperms an abominable mystery because for a while, angiosperms appeared to originate in the early Cretaceous and just quickly diversify, which went against his view of gradual evolution. Gradual and fast is all a matter of perspective when it comes to evolution. True. Well, Darwin thought that there might be a lost island or continent that showed flowering plants developing earlier than the Cretaceous.

Based on fossilized spores, land plants, terrestrial plants, may have been around for at least 475 million years. Again, those first plants with seeds were gymnosperms like conifers, pines and firs, and ginkgos, but no flowers. It's possible that flowering plants came even earlier than the Cretaceous. There's a 2018 study that found a flowering plant from the early Jurassic in what's now China. It's a new species, Nangianthus. There's evidence of seeds in the ovary.

And it has numerous compression fossils that look like flowers, ridges and veins. Yeah, I remember when that came out and it really...

threw me for a little bit of a loop because originally we had talked about, oh, when these angiosperms evolved, maybe that's when like hadrosaurs and some of these other animals took off because maybe they were better adapted for eating angiosperms than something like sauropods were, which weren't doing as well at the end of the Cretaceous. But like you were saying, now the thinking is probably more related to insects. Yes. Not to say that couldn't have had some downstream effects on dinosaur populations and the

It's hard to know the magnitude of how much of the earth was covered by these plants because you just get these little snapshots here and there. Yeah, if you think studying dinosaurs is difficult, I think plants and fungi are another level. Maybe. At least they have spores. True. And seeds. There was a 2021 study that used statistics to estimate the ages of angiosperms based on the fossil record, and they found several families originated in the Jurassic. Hmm.

There's also one plant described in 1956 from the late Triassic that may be an early angiosperm, but not everyone agrees. Wow. That one's called Sanmigalia lewisii, and it grew up to two feet or 60 centimeters tall. It had a conical woody stem and broad elliptical leaves, and it had pollen, so probably pollinated via insects. There were also fossils found in 2013 that

from the Middle Triassic in what's now Switzerland, about 247 to 242 million years ago. Oh, possibly before dinosaurs. Yeah, which found angiosperm-like pollen. This study, they analyzed pollen grains and suggested that associated plants were pollinated by insects, likely beetles, because bees didn't evolve until about 100 million years later. Yeah.

That's why we keep it broad with the insects. There's six types of pollen found in the sample, so it might have been diverse flowering plants. The pollen grains are from subtropics and in two areas, one that was drier than the other, so maybe they lived in a broad range of environments. In 2001, geochemists found evidence that flowers may have evolved 250 million years ago or somewhere in the Permian, going even further back. Wow.

They found oleanane in rock deposits hundreds of millions of years old. It's produced by many flowering plants, and it defends against insects, fungi, and microbes, but other plants with seeds like pines and gingkoes don't produce it. It comes from seed plants from the Permian called gigantoterids, so it shows that they're some of the earliest relatives of flowering plants. They share a lot of traits.

However, there was a study in 2019. It was called the hunting the snark, the flawed search for mythical Jurassic angiosperms. I think it's funny to think of plants as the snark. And that one said that there were a number of recent studies that claim to find and describe pre-Cretaceous angiosperms. Quote, with rare exceptions, these papers fail to define a flower. It's like a lot of these things.

The definition sometimes is a bit vague. Yeah, like you're talking about patterns of elliptical leaves, but really with flowers, you think of petals, not just leaves. I bet there's a whole bunch of things to consider with flowers that we don't know. But it reminds me how even the term mass extinction is a bit vague. Yeah, you always have to define your terms. Yes.

They also said the fossils of these plants tend to be disarticulated, and the studies also tend not to state which features unambiguously show it's an angiosperm or infers features that are interpreted differently from other researchers. So they found these studies to be problematic. And they said, quote, given the current evidence, all supposed pre-Cretaceous angiosperms are assignable to other major clades among the gymnosperms sensu late, which means in the broad sense. That's interesting.

So this found the opposite of Charles Darwin, where angiosperms in the early Cretaceous radiated relatively quickly and the fossils are related to modern angiosperms, and there's no obvious morphological gaps. So, quote, all features suggest a primary radiation. They said, quote, the Jurassic angiosperm, essentially a product of molecular phylogenetic,

may have become the holy grail of paleobotany, but it appears equally mythical. Yeah, I often have that thought when people are looking at these trees of life, be they dinosaurs, a specific dinosaur group or a plant group, and you sort of try to estimate back to the common ancestor because there's always that big assumption of, well, it takes about this long for these changes to happen in the DNA or for these changes to happen in the morphology of an animal or plant, but

We know, as you've talked about before, that evolution tends to happen in these sort of surges and plateaus and then surges and plateaus. So if you're in one of those periods where things are just changing really rapidly, it's very hard to draw a straight line through that and say like, well, it would have taken like 30 million years to make all those changes because sometimes a bunch of changes happen really rapidly. And if your only evidence for there being Jurassic angiosperms is just the

There were a lot of different types of angiosperms in the Cretaceous, and we think it would have taken a while for them to evolve. That's not good primary evidence. Right. That's an inference. Or you have fossils, but it's actually not totally clear if they're gymnosperms or angiosperms.

Not to say there won't be Jurassic angiosperms. Or Permian. I guess so. Because also we've seen really long ghost lineages where there's like one thing in that type and then you don't see more of them for many, many millions of years. Or maybe it becomes a debate like the psilosaurs and ornithischians. Where do they fit in? We do know that flowering plants eventually took over.

But for a long time, scientists thought that flowers were too fragile to fossilize and be found millions of years later. It wasn't until Elsie Marie Friess, a paleobotanist and professor emerita at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, developed a technique to find fossil flowers that scientists found more fossilized flowers. She would crumble soft sediments into a sieve and wash away sand grains and water and save the specks of charcoal.

And this came from sediments about 80 million years old. And then under a microscope, she could see small 3D flowers. What? I did not expect it to be a microfossil when you're talking about finding flowers. Yes.

Well, according to a New Yorker article about fossil flowers, quote, wildfires often burn plants to ash, but where the oxygen supply is limited, for example, in the middle of a tree trunk or beneath the litter of the forest floor, it also has the power to preserve. Heat vaporizes the moisture and plant tissue and may leave behind a black carbon skeleton, which can survive in geological strata for tens of millions of years.

So other paleobotanists use this method now to find flowers all over the world. Bruce Tiffany, a paleobotanist from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the 1970s found the first charcoal flower fossil. Nice. Yeah, it's pretty cool that they could use these new techniques and figure out, like, oh, we can find evidence from way earlier than we thought. Mm-hmm. Now, like I said, plants, well, angiosperms have taken over. Today, there's about 290,000 angiosperm species. Wow.

which some places I found say are 78% of all terrestrial plants. So how did they end up taking over? Well, they can produce more quickly than gymnosperms. They could also mutate quickly and get redundant genes to adapt to their environment. Their average genome size shrank during the Cretaceous, so that gave them an advantage. They could cram more cells into leaves and be more efficient for photosynthesis, transpiration, and growth.

Being fast growing, they could spread quickly into charred landscapes back when fires were more common. And then producing pollen, fruits, and seeds would have helped small animals to grow. So angiosperms worked with small animals after the extinction, not just insects. And then the flowers, fruits, and seeds grew larger as the animals did too. A 2021 study found that within 15 million years of the asteroid at the end Cretaceous, rainforests with closed canopies developed. They'd never existed before.

So even if there's a debate about when angiosperms started, we know they rose in the late Cretaceous and Paleocene. The Paleocenes from about 66 to 56 million years ago. A 2023 study found that angiosperms came out of the end Cretaceous extinction relatively unscathed and good for them. They lost some species, but the extinction actually helped them become more dominant. So it wasn't just good for mammals.

The study used statistical analysis to figure it out, and they analyzed about 32,000 to 73,000 modern species and showed relatively constant extinction rates throughout time. So there's no evidence for mass extinction of these plants at the KPG boundary. Wow. Yeah. They're the only ones. I guess you said there's no evidence of. Right. Okay.

Because it's hard to know for sure, but that's still really impressive. That is. They seem to do pretty well. I mean, many of them did die out with the dinosaurs, but the larger lineages of flowering plants survived. So they, I mean, they had their losses too. Oh yeah. You said no evidence of mass extinction, not no evidence of extinction. Yes. So the major lineages seem to have survived, which is the opposite of dinosaurs.

That's for sure. And then they recovered, the angiosperms recovered in diversity in the Paleocene. And it could be because they're more adaptable. They're also diverse. You've got things like grass, trees, water lilies, and it helped being pollinated by insects as well as the wind. A 2019 study found evidence of beetle angiosperm pollination preserved in Burmese amber from about 99 million years ago.

It's a tumbling flower beetle carrying pollen grains that belong to angiosperms, and it helped show that insects did help angiosperms dominate. The beetle had body parts specialized for feeding on flowers like pollen-feeding mouth parts. These pollen grains also had clumping characteristics which are associated with insect pollination. A 2020 study found the oldest known bee-bearing pollen that was also found in amber from 100 million years ago. It's called Discoscapa apiculae.

And it had legs laden with pollen. Yeah, that's what we're used to seeing. The bee lands, it gets a bunch of pollen stuck to its legs. And then when it goes to the next flower, it exchanges some of the pollen. Yes. And then there's evidence that dinosaurs helped plants spread their seeds, which I will get into with our dinosaur of the day. And we will get into that dinosaur, Jehonus, in just a moment. But first, a quick break for our sponsors.

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And now on to our dinosaur of the day, Jehalornis. That was an avialan dinosaur that lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now Hebei province in China, found in the Jiufotong Formation. More specimens have also been found in the Yixian Formation, which is an older formation. Jehalornis looked somewhat similar to Archaeopteryx, but the tail fanned out more and the head was smaller and shorter and it had shorter legs.

It was a large basil bird, and it was one of the earliest diverging birds. It was about the size of a turkey, although sometimes it was said to be raven-sized. I guess ravens and turkeys could be similar in size. I guess. I think ravens are a lot smaller. Could be a really large raven and a really small turkey. I guess so. It might also depend on if you're talking about weight or wingspan or length. Right.

Well, Jeholornis is estimated to be up to two and a half feet or 0.76 meters long and weigh between five and 20 pounds or over two to over nine kilograms. A 2009 study found Jeholornis grew slowly compared to most modern birds. However, Kiwi birds also grow slowly. So it's possible Jeholornis has similar metabolism to a Kiwi bird. That's funny. Fun fact. Everything about Kiwis is funny. Yeah.

Oh, except for laying eggs that are a third the size of their body. That doesn't sound funny. No. Also, if you're an insect that's trying to eat, then it's not funny. Anyway, Jeholornis had a short high skull and short stout lower jaws that curved downward. Its teeth were small, blunt, and peg-like. There were no serrations. One species, Jeholornis prima, had no teeth in the upper jaws and only three small teeth in the lower jaws.

But another species, Jeholornis palmapennis, had a few teeth in the middle of the upper jaw and no teeth in the front. Jeholornis had well-developed shoulders and strong wing muscles, as well as short, robust fingers and robust arms that were longer than the legs. It's very different than a kiwi. Yes. Since legs weren't long, it probably wasn't a great runner. The hallux, or the first toe, was partially reversed, pointing inward and slightly backward.

And it had strongly curved claws on the first toes, so it may have been able to perch and spend time in trees. Jehoanus had a long bony tail, about 16 and a half inches or 42 centimeters long. And it had more than 20 tail bones. It had 22 tail bones. Its tail was similar to dromaeosaurids or raptors with strongly interlocking vertebrae, so it had a stiff tail. Oh, wow. That's interesting. Yeah. And it had tail feathers.

There was a 2013 study that found two types of tails for Jehalonis. One was like a palm frond, like the leaf of a palm tree at the tip of the tail, and the other was more fan-shaped over the base of the tail. Now, having two types of tails could mean there were different uses, like for flight and balance versus for communication and display. The frond was mostly ornamental or for display, and the tail fan may have helped streamline the body and reduce drag.

So it all kind of shows the complexity of tail evolution. Yeah, that's interesting. They had two types of tails. The first one you said that I thought there were two hypotheses for what kind of tail it had, but it actually at different times had different tails. Yes. I wonder, I mean, there's obviously going to be perpetual questions of are these even the same species? Are they the same sex? All that kind of stuff. Right. It also had asymmetrical flight feathers, which means it could fly.

Possibly it glided or parachuted instead of flapping to fly. It couldn't lift its arms vertically because the shoulder girdle was slung low, but it probably had a weak downstroke because it was missing some features that would provide strength and support to the bones. It did have expanded ribs, which may have helped it fly, because that could be where the muscles attached.

But the reason it's the dinosaur of the day is that Jeholornis is the earliest known bird to eat fruit. Birds diversified and became abundant about 135 million years ago. And then plants started developing new different fruits shortly after. And these fruit eating birds...

help spread plant seeds in their droppings, which may mean that birds and plants co-evolved. Okay, and we're back to the angiosperms and dinosaurs co-evolving. Earlier we were saying it was probably more insects. Yes. Well, could be lots of factors. The type specimen of Jehorna spima was found with over 50 round seeds around the crop. That's part of the digestive system. And each were about 8 to 10 millimeters wide seeds.

In 2022, the holotype of Jeholornis was described as having plant remains scattered around it and looking like they exploded out of the stomach area. Oh, man. These seeds were similar in size to watermelon seeds. So at first, it was thought that Jeholornis ate seeds.

But then a 2018 study found one specimen with gastroliths in its stomach. They described gastroliths found in five Jehoiarnas specimens, and the cluster of stones was nearly identical in each specimen. It was a tight mass of small stones. They also described three specimens found with seeds. Those seeds were found in the abdomen, which may mean Jehoiarnas didn't have a crop, which is that pouch above the neck.

They studied 90 specimens of Jeholornis because it's one of those species where there's just so many skeletons found. And they found eight with either seeds or gastroliths. There were no specimens found with both seeds and gastroliths. Weird. Yeah. So the 2022 study looked at if Jeholornis was eating seeds or fruit. If it ate seeds, it wouldn't have helped the plant because the seeds would be crushed up and digested and not spread through poop.

They studied dozens of specimens and they compared the jaws of Jeholornis to modern birds, including species that grind seeds, species that crack seeds, and species that eat fruit. And they found, well, Jeholornis wouldn't have cracked seeds. Good for the plants. Yes. Unless it was grinding them. Since some Jeholornis specimens had been found with gastroliths and some found with whole seeds, which weren't ground up,

And again, those seeds and gastroliths were never found together. It may mean that Jehorneus ate different foods depending on the time of year. Oh, I see. So when it was eating seeds, it didn't need the gastroliths. And then at other times of years, it needed gastroliths to grind up something else. Exactly. And when there was fruit, it would eat the fruit with the seeds and poop out the uncrushed seeds. Because they weren't the gastroliths to grind them up. Exactly.

When they were using the gastroliths, they were eating something tougher. We don't know what. Haven't found that in the gut contents yet, I guess. So it helps show the beginnings of birds and flowering plants relationship. The study reconstructed Jehovanus' skull from CT scans, and they compared them to modern birds and other non-avian dinosaurs. And they saw that it had a transitional brain, something between non-avian dinosaurs and birds. And non-avian dinosaurs had a good sense of smell and not great sight. And modern birds have great sight and not the best sense of smell.

So it was somewhere in between. Although Jehoan has had a better sense of smell than most modern birds, which may have helped it find fruit. Seems like modern birds do a good job at finding fruit. Yes. From what we've seen around fruit trees. True, true. But it also means Jehoan probably could see better during the day than at night. So it's probably more active in the daytime. And then eating fruit may have put on pressure to become better at flying to find the fruit. And the long tail maybe helps stabilize it while flying like a rudder.

Now it's unclear what seeds that were found with Jeholornis, what they belonged to exactly. It might have been fruit from gymnosperms or angiosperms. Again, true fruits are only in angiosperms, but some gymnosperms produce things like fruits. They're fleshy with a seed. It could be that early fruit-eating birds were opportunistic and ate from both because...

Dinosaurs are opportunistic. Well, all animals are opportunistic. Yeah, I was going to say, like apes like to eat fruit, but will also eat other things that's available. There was a 2023 study that found Jehorna's eight leaves that likely came from an angiosperm, which helps support the hypothesis that early birds and flowering plants helped each other. They found fossil plant phytoliths, rigid microscopic particles of silicon dioxide that form in plant tissues that

in the digestive tract of a Jehalornis specimen. Oh, interesting. That's a popular one on grasses, but other angiosperms have them too. They found hundreds of phytoliths, and after comparing them to over 4,000 kinds of modern phytoliths, they found the fossil ones came from the leaves of magnoliids, a clade of flowering plants that have more than 10,000 species, including magnolias, but also nutmeg, cinnamon, avocado, black pepper, and more.

I had no idea that magnoliads were such a large group. Me either, or that they were related to black pepper. Every time I learn something about plants and plants that are related, I'm surprised. Well, we do mostly talk about dinosaurs. Yeah, but you know, because we're used to like the culinary side of things and the taste of cinnamon, avocado, pepper, and a flowering magnolia don't have much in common. Although I do think magnolias might be one of those flowers you can eat.

I'm going to have to fact check that. Well, for this study, they also found no evidence of phytoliths in the rock surrounding the skeleton, which shows that the phytoliths were part of the dinosaur's diet. Nice.

They also compared the lower jaw of Jehoornis to modern birds and found similarities to living birds that eat mostly plants, including the hoatzin, which is a tropical bird that eats leaves. Yeah, that's very interesting too. I was also thinking that with these birds that eat flowering plants or eat fruit from trees and how that may have affected their evolution and their spread, they

That is the case, likely, in the areas where those birds evolved. What we've talked about before, northeastern China had tons of bird diversity, but a lot of the world didn't seem to have that many types of birds at the time, at least that we found in the fossil record. So maybe in that area, angiosperms were being spread a lot by things like Jeholornis, but outside of the Jehol biota. It was insects. It could have been insects or other animals. Yeah, could be.

Or wind, like you were saying. We don't know what we don't know. Yep. Well, Jeholornis was named in 2002 by Zhonghe Zhou and Fu Cheng Zhang. The type species is Jeholornis prima. The genus name means Jehol bird. There's at least three species, prima, palmipennis, and curvipes.

The species name Prima refers to the primitive appearance of the tail. It means the first in Latin. Then Jingmei O'Connor and others named Jeholornis palmapennis in 2012, and that species name means palm tail. And in 2014, Ulysses Lefevre and others named Jeholornis curvipes, and that name means curved foot and refers to the distinctive bend in the bones above the ankle.

Sounds like some people are splitting out the fan tail versus the palm tail in different species. Good point. Which is not a different genus. So they're still all Jeholornis. Yes. The holotype of Jeholornis is a nearly complete articulated skeleton found in five slabs. Now more than a hundred Jeholornis specimens have been found, which makes it a great animal to study. Yeah. There was one specimen that was thought for a while to be a new dinosaur, Shunjo raptor sinensis.

And was also described in 2002, but now it's thought to be a junior synonym of Jeholornis prima. The genus name, just for fun, Shenzhou Raptor means China plunderer or China hunter. And Shenzhou is an ancient name for China. That's a fun one. Yeah. Too bad no one can ever use it again. Well, it was kind of a race. Jeholornis and Shenzhou Raptor were described in the same month within days of each other. Oh, wow.

Technically, Shenzhou Raptor was named in a newspaper two days before the article naming Jeholornis came out. But the official paper that named Shenzhou Raptor was published in a monthly journal and didn't have a specific date for the issue. Oh, what? So ICZM prioritizes articles over monthly journals, which means Shenzhou Raptor is a junior synonym to Jeholornis. Because Shenzhou Raptor didn't have a date on the issue. Exactly. Exactly.

I always assumed that if you didn't have a date, you just did the first of the month. I guess they say it's the end of the month equivalent. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I didn't know about that rule. I bet the authors of the Shenzhou Raptor paper know that rule very intimately now. Oh, yes, I'm sure. That must have been a tough month. Jehoranus is a good name too. It is.

Well, at first they were thought to be different dinosaurs because Shenzhou Raptor is smaller than Jehorus and didn't have teeth. But it could just be due to the specimen's age and also what got preserved. There are some differences in the number of tail bones, but it turns out it was just missing some tail bones. Sounds like there could be something to that. There could be because in 2020, Wong and others named...

Compsoinus longicatus and re-evaluated all Jehalornis species, including Shenzhou Raptor, and they found that Shenzhou Raptor was valid. So maybe that month's timing isn't going to matter after all. Maybe not, but that's almost, what, 20-ish years or 18 years before that paper came out that validated it. Could be longer. Could be like Brontosaurus. That's true.

Well, other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place as Jehorus include titanosaurs, lots of birds, dromaeosaurs like Microraptor, and tyrannosaurids like Sinotyrannus. And other animals that lived around the same time and place include fish, mammals, pterosaurs, and crustaceans. And then, of course, there were lots of plants. Mm-hmm. And probably some fungus. And now for our fun facts.

Like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, there's two. And I'll start with there are giant sinkholes with ancient forests. Does that mean there's an ancient forest in a sinkhole? Yes. Huh. Actually, there's a bunch of these. Sounds like Land of the Lost or something. I want to thank our listener, Richard, who shared this with us. There was a study from 2024 by Li Li Zheng and others that described a sinkhole. Cave explorers found it. It's about 300 meters or 1,000 feet long.

150 meters or 500 feet wide and more than 190 meters or 630 feet deep. That is a huge area. That's like a stadium sized area. Yes. This is located in the Dashua Tiankang group in China. And it's actually one of 30 holes known as Tiankang, which means heavenly pits. Heavenly pits. Yeah.

It's a natural refuge for ancient forests, meaning it's home to species not seen anywhere else, like endangered plants and primitive forest ecosystems. Wait, there are living forests in these? Oh, it is very land of the lost. I was assuming this was going to be like fossils. No, this is, if you're willing to explore it, you can see. So there's a good chance that previously unknown species will be discovered in these sinkholes. Wow, that's crazy. Yeah.

There's towering cliffs and steep terrain, so people aren't really in the area. The plants there, they don't get much light, but they still thrive, even though they're growing at the bottom. And the sinkhole has underground water, and these plants like moisture and shade. Yeah, I would expect so. If they didn't, they probably wouldn't last very long. That's true.

The team collected samples from 64 plant species, and they found that nettles, ferns, and other plants there live off of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and magnesium, which are things that usually limit plant growth. But these plants have evolved with them, and they grow tall. They have higher levels of nutrients in their tissues.

And having so many nutrients, they grow faster. So they've adapted by adjusting their nutrient content and they absorb the nutrients more easily. And they don't use as much carbon as plants on the surface. I guess this kind of shows why plants did well after the KPG extinction. They're so adaptable. A sinkhole emerges when the roof of an underground chamber enlarges and collapses. Like there's erosions of rocks like limestone that make sinkholes, caves, and underground rivers.

About 300 Tiankung have been found around the world, and China has two-thirds of them. But they've also been found in Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, Madagascar, Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, and Spain, as well as some other countries. That is fascinating. Yes. I'm also surprised that there are some...

In like Italy and Spain and Croatia and Slovenia. I'm surprised that they exist at all. Yeah. But if they exist somewhere, I'm imagining somewhere very moist, you know, like parts of China or Madagascar, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea. Those make sense to me. But like Europe isn't just where I think of sinkholes filled with forests. That just seems...

I don't know. Maybe that's just my European bias thinking like I know of the stuff that's in Europe, but these more exotic places might have more interesting stuff going on and I'm just way off base. But yeah.

That's really interesting. Also, when you had said that there were sinkholes full of these forests, what I was imagining was there was a forest there and then the sinkhole opens up and then you see the forest inside it. But it kind of seems like it could be the opposite of that. The sinkhole opens up. Now there's this environment available for plants to live in and somehow these plants make their way into it.

We just don't know how long. That's the really interesting thing, how long that ecosystem has been there. Because if it's been there long enough, then you do get enough time for new interesting things to evolve in that ecosystem. But since they're so isolated, it would be hard for plants to get from one to the other. Not saying they can't because there's wind and there are insects and there are other things that eat fruit and might bring them to different areas. But I want to learn a lot more about these.

Like you were saying, being isolated, though, we talk about this with prehistoric animals.

And how when they're isolated, they tend to evolve into stranger looking things. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the thing. If there's 300 of them, are the 300 mostly the same species? Or is each of them starting to diversify into its own unique set of species? Or maybe there's just a couple of unique ones at each. Yeah, I'm not sure. We got to go there. You got to go there. Repel down the 600 feet into the sinkhole.

expand I Know Dino more into the plant world. I'm into it. Well, my second fun fact since this episode was about plants and fungi is that there are species of fungi that are carnivorous.

Actually, there's more than 200 described carnivorous species. So I'm imagining like how there's flesh-eating bacteria, that there's somehow some sort of flesh-eating fungus. Kind of. They go after nematodes or worms. Okay, that's fortunate for us. Yes. Not for the worms. That's true. It took me until researching this episode to look up nematodes.

But I remember first wondering about them when watching the show Doug in the 90s, which I know is dating myself here. Was there a nematode in that show? It's like the second episode. It kind of was like hunt the snark, find the nematode. Oh, interesting. Anyway, carnivorous fungi also go after amoeba and springtails, invertebrates that aren't insects, but they do have internal mouthparts. So again, we humans are safe.

The fungi trap and eat these microscopic and small animals. There was one study in 2007 by Alexander Schmidt and others that found carnivorous fungi in amber from the Cretaceous, not from Myanmar, but from France, about 100 million years ago. There were four fragments with fungi found, and one fragment has a piece of decomposed wood with the fungus and the trapping ring, as well as yeast cells and several nematodes.

Other fragments have trapping rings or the beginnings of a ring, yeast colonies, and nematodes. And again, yeasts are fungi. The trapping rings would have closed and held nematodes in place, and then the hyphae, those long branching structures of the fungi, would have consumed the nematodes. Hmm.

Kind of sounds like a funnel web spider or some of these other animals that make a little round trap for something to fall into it and then grab it. I guess like a Venus fly trap or something too. Yes. Except it's going after worms or worm-like animals. Something that's not fun for the prey. No. So yeah, that's our episode on dinosaurs and plants and fungi.

It felt like a totally new territory for me. So that was a lot of fun to research. Yeah, that was really good. Good job. Thank you. Well, that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Stay tuned in our next episode. We're going to do some March Madness dinosaur style. That'll be fun. And don't forget, if you want to join our community and get our Allosaurus patch for 2025. Last chance. Last chance. Head over to our Patreon, patreon.com slash I Know Dino. Thanks again. And until next time.

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Before you go, I've got a podcast recommendation for you. Every week, the show Living Planet brings you the facts, debates, and a variety of perspectives to better understand the key environmental stories of our time. Their team dives deep into topics like whether a four-day work week is better for the planet, how companies are capturing CO2 and sucking it out of the air, and even how you can repurpose roadkill as a gourmet meal. They focus on solutions and how we can make our world a little healthier.

You can find Living Planet every Friday wherever you're listening to this on your favorite podcast app.