The next time you pop a blueberry in your mouth, think about this: the fleshy fruits we eat today may partly exist because of dinosaurs. A stunning trove of fossils from New Mexico suggests that flowering plants were already making big, animal-friendly fruits tens of millions of years earlier than scientists thought and that prehistoric creatures, perhaps even dinosaurs, were likely helping to spread those seeds around the ancient forests.
A new 2026 study, titled ‘Diversification of angiosperm reproductive strategies predated the end-Cretaceous extinction,’ was published in Science by paleoecologist Jaemin Lee and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. The team analyzed 450 fossil diaspores from volcanic ash in south-central New Mexico, findings that could challenge decades of scientific consensus. The fossils, collected from the site from 1992 to 2016, date to about 74.6 million years ago.
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