Early Flowering Plants May Have Relied on Dinosaurs to Eat Their Fleshy Fruits and Spread Their Seeds

According to fossils preserved by volcanic ash, the plants, known as angiosperms, began producing relatively large, blueberry-size fruits millions of years earlier than previously thought

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

July 6, 2026 3:12 p.m.

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Flowering plants may have started producing relatively large, fleshy fruits millions of years earlier than previously thought—and they probably relied on hungry, herbivorous dinosaurs to help spread their seeds, scientists report in a study published June 25 in the journal Science.

Today, plants that produce flowers and enclose their seeds in fruit—known as angiosperms—make up roughly 80 percent of all known land plants. Their fruits, which range from juicy peaches to refreshing watermelons, are consumed by numerous animals that later distribute their seeds via droppings. But that wasn’t always the case.

Roughly 136 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous period, the first flowering plants emerged. These were mostly petite and weedy, producing only small seeds that spread by falling to the ground or catching a ride on the breeze. Then, according to a longstanding narrative, angiosperms diversified their reproductive strategies after the Chicxulub impact wiped out non-avian dinosaurs roughly 66 million years ago. As fruit-eating mammals began to flourish, the plants dedicated more resources to producing larger, fleshy, seed-bearing fruits—or so scientists thought.

Now, a recent analysis of plant fossils discovered in south-central New Mexico challenges that story. The new findings suggest flowering plants were producing large fruits nearly 75 million years ago, which is about ten million years earlier than previously estimated.

The fossils came from the Jose Creek Formation, preserved in a 0.75-mile-long layer of solidified ash known as Dori’s tuff. The ash settled after a nearby volcanic eruption about 74.6 million years ago, effectively freezing in time what was then a mature, tropical forest—much like the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

“It’s really a snapshot in time,” says study co-author Cindy Looy, a paleobotanist and evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement. “At the base of the solidified ash layer, you can still find ground cover plants. And then a little bit higher up, you just see leaves in all kinds of orientations, because they were brought down by the ash.”

For the past three decades, researchers have been studying the deposit to reconstruct the ancient forest, which contained an array of flowering trees, mature conifers and palms. During the Late Cretaceous, the site was about 125 miles inland from the Western Interior Seaway, a body of water that once divided eastern and western North America.

Scientists have recovered hundreds of fossilized plant parts from the formation, including 77 kinds of diaspores, or plant dispersal units such as fruits and seeds, that were analyzed for the study. Of those, 5 percent were “winged,” meaning they were probably dispersed primarily by the wind. Another 34 percent were “fleshy,” which suggests they were tasty snacks for plant-eating dinosaurs and other animals.

“While many Mesozoic animals, like dinosaurs, birds, pterosaurs and mammals, were suggested to have consumed angiosperm diaspores, we didn’t have the botanical evidence supporting this,” lead author Jaemin Lee, a paleoecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, tells New Scientist’s James Woodford. “Now we have.”

The fossilized diaspores found in the Jose Creek Formation are “pretty sizable,” says Lee in the statement, about the size of a blueberry or a large acorn—far bigger than the poppy seed-size fruit and seed fossils discovered in other Cretaceous deposits. Together, the discoveries suggest that, in at least some parts of the world, flowering plants were already producing relatively large fruits before the dinosaurs went extinct.

This fits in with other changes to plants that occurred during the Cretaceous. At that time, the organisms were diversifying their size, leaves and flowers to become more efficient and specialized, so “it only makes sense that the reproductive structures would be similarly evolving,” Selena Smith, a paleobotanist at the University of Michigan who was not involved with the research, tells Science News’ Jake Buehler.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.