Fun idea. At least one correction for the table: For wila/bryorii fremonti's age of 250mya they cite the "geologic history" of... moss. Wila is a lichen, which is primarily fungal with algal symbiotes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryoria_fremontii And even given an edible moss, the fact that moss existed 250mya would not imply that particular species existed "morphologically unchanged". The "reindeer lichen" entry appears to have the same issue.
magneticnorth 1 hours ago [-]
This is an interesting way to think about plants and animals.
I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find sources for known age of species - is that information collected somewhere? Or is it something we often just don't know because of how sparse the fossil record is?
Wondering because of trying to look up the age of fern species I do eat (no cinnamon fern near me) and I can't find out.
cogman10 43 minutes ago [-]
That's because when something becomes a new species is a surprisingly difficult and contentious debate in biology.
That's simply due to the nature of evolution. It's nearly impossible to look at one past generation of chicken to the next to figure out when the ancestor was no longer a chicken. Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix.
Every generation is a new missing link. It's an extremely fuzzy process.
usrnm 13 minutes ago [-]
> Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix
Afaik, T-Rex was never a direct ancestor of modern birds, including chicken. T-Rex and birds are theropod dinosaurs, but it was a very large and diverse group of animals.
b112 20 minutes ago [-]
Greg Bear and his fancy pants radio says otherwise.
throwup238 53 minutes ago [-]
> I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find sources for known age of species - is that information collected somewhere? Or is it something we often just don't know because of how sparse the fossil record is?
It depends on what you mean by the age of the species. You can find the oldest known fossil occurrence at the Paleobiology Database [1] and the divergence time from molecular phylogenies via TimeTree [2].
It's pretty tricky to find out, yeah. And new evidence is coming in all the time. All the methods are either floors (a fossil at X date proves a species existed then, but lack of fossils found yet might be inconclusive) or estimates (like molecular clock techniques). Dating fossils themselves (or rather the rocks they're buried in) isn't always easy or possible. For more out-of-the-way species, if anyone has bothered trying to figure out the age it's likely buried in scientific sources that are tricky for novices to find or search, and maybe under debate.
psychoslave 30 minutes ago [-]
That make wonder, how many fossils there might be at total on earth, and with current trend, how much time would humanity should continue to survive before those remaining will approach zero, if fossil formation as a known rate.
bubblewand 8 minutes ago [-]
Immense numbers. Quarries destroy them by the (enormous) truckload all the time, unexamined, god knows what cool unknown stuff has been ground up. Entire kinds of rock are basically made of fossils, not even always the really tiny kind (note: fossils can be microscopic!)
Then consider what's buried under the sea, totally inaccessible. Or under the ice at the poles.
It's a lot of fossils. And that's without even getting into questions like "what counts as a fossil for these purposes?", just any halfway sensible answer is going to leave you with an unfathomably big number, no need to even dig (ha, ha) into the specifics.
The places scientists go to dig up fossils are mostly where a particular stratum happens to exist (the crust gets recycled, so much of the oldest stuff is simply gone in most of the world) and happens to be exposed near the surface. Those same kinds of (for the more common strata, anyway) exist all over the place, just buried too deep to get at except, sometimes, during commercial excavation for things like mining (and then most of it's just gonna be destroyed without a look).
throwup238 21 minutes ago [-]
> how many fossils there might be at total on earth
The number is both incalculable and vague - is a shark tooth enough to count as a fossil? How about diatoms and other microfossils?
Diatomaceous earth alone contains around 10^6-10^7 frustules (the shell of a diatom) per gram. If you count them as fossils then the lower bound is 10^18 fossils per year just in diatomaceous earth production.
hnlmorg 12 minutes ago [-]
If you have a fossil, and break it in half, then do you now have two fossils?
munificent 2 hours ago [-]
If you don't restrict the list to living things, then salt and water are surely the oldest answers. :)
procaryote 6 minutes ago [-]
Hydrogen ions are edible, although usually dissolved in water. Hydrogen ions existed before oxygen or water
hnlmorg 13 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if there are any fungi that would make that list?
kleiba 2 hours ago [-]
Hands up who has ever eaten anything from that list!
embedding-shape 1 hours ago [-]
I think this might say more about your geographic location than you think :)
People from other continents always surprise me with various fruits they taken for granted their entire life, but I've never heard about, and vice-versa.
SideburnsOfDoom 1 hours ago [-]
> I think this might say more about your geographic location than you think
Clearly, for instance Welwitschia (1) listed. I think this says a lot about location.
It's a fascinating plant, but it is an endangered species, endemic to the Namib desert. And as far as I know, not that commonly eaten.
Lotus root is pretty common in Chinese and Japanese cuisine. I've had it pickled and in a Sichuan dry pot. It's crunchy and takes on flavors pretty well.
arunc 2 hours ago [-]
We use it in cuisines from India, particularly from Tamil nadu, as well. Lotus root, seeds, the petals, pretty much all.
48 minutes ago [-]
CGMthrowaway 1 hours ago [-]
Whoever smelled a ginkgo fruit and said "let's eat this" !
heathrow83829 58 minutes ago [-]
my wife and I regularly eat lotus root, it's quite delicious and common in chinese cooking. the others not so much.
On a side note there are 1000s even 10s of thousand of edible plant based species that grow on the earth. i don't know how old they are though.
magneticnorth 1 hours ago [-]
Fiddleheads from ferns are available at farmer's markets in the spring in my area, though not from the cinnamon fern specifically.
I'm having trouble finding sources for other specific fern species, though many ferns have been around for hundreds of millions of years.
2OEH8eoCRo0 54 minutes ago [-]
I used to get them at Whole Foods in Nashua, NH. They're quite seasonal so I'd always grab some if I see em.
mgh2 2 hours ago [-]
Water caltrop nuts are common in Taiwan, very nutty and good for meat soups.
zdragnar 1 hours ago [-]
Fern fiddleheads aren't bad if you get them at the right time, but I wouldn't go out of my way to eat them.
droopyEyelids 2 hours ago [-]
Lotus root is pretty common. A crunchy tuber that keeps its texture after cooking, bland taste, unique visual appeal. I threw some in the last pot of bean chili my family made, and the kids liked it.
kilpikaarna 21 minutes ago [-]
Reindeer lichen is not a moss (Wiki link), or even a Plantae...
It's a staple food in some cultures. It needs preprocessing, but people have been doing that for a while
ge96 2 hours ago [-]
People eat Horseshoe Crabs? No way, but their precious blood give me
OJFord 1 hours ago [-]
'eaten as a delicacy in some parts of Asia' according to Wikipedia, but to be fair OP is only asserting possibilities anyway (the criteria are 1) old enough to have been around for dinosaurs to eat; 2) edible by humans).
ipsum2 22 minutes ago [-]
I've tried it in Thailand on a dare, there's very little edible meat on it
throwup238 32 minutes ago [-]
Technically they eat the roe. Horseshoe crabs have very little meat and it’s so tough as to be practically inedible.
trilogic 8 minutes ago [-]
The theory of evolution didn´t work on Horseshow crab?
Darwin did you read that. Maybe nasa should read it too :)
I thought avocados were where old food eaten by dinosaurs or at least very large ancient rodents. I guess it doesn't meet the 100 million year old age mark.
andrewflnr 30 minutes ago [-]
It was once thought that giant ground sloths were important for spreading avocados, but that seems to have been a mistake. Anyway, that was long after the dinosaurs. Flowering plants in general were still pretty new by the time the dinosaurs died out. I bet an actual dinosaur never saw an avocado. :)
I take Gingo three times a week, and eat Horseshoe Crab a few times a year.
notorandit 1 hours ago [-]
Meat
plaguna 1 hours ago [-]
Which one?
JohnMakin 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe pythons - some types of crocodile/alligators. But that's very region specific.
icameron 21 minutes ago [-]
Sturgeon. Maybe lamprey (I've never tried it)
droopyEyelids 2 hours ago [-]
Seeing my neighbors gathering ginkgo nuts made me curious enough to try them, and I waded right in without understanding the risks! TLDR— they're not a great food source. It's yet another one of those cases where you have to wonder what "delicacy" means.
The actual fruit (looks like a rotten plum, smells terrible) has ginkgolic acids which cause contact dermatitis (think poison ivy).
Then the nuts themselves contain Ginkgotoxin, which interferes with your B6, screwing up your nervous system and causing seizures. Cooking reduces but does not eliminate Ginkgotoxin.
I only ate one, and ate it raw. It was a delightful texture, but tasted like chewing random plant matter. Like leaves from a tree. Was maybe half a cubic centimeter of matter. Escaped any ill effects.
According to my research, kids can have seizures from as few as 10 nuts, which would probably be like 1.5 spoonfuls if you mashed them up. The guidelines I found don't seem very scientific but supposedly a kid can safely handle 3-5 nuts over the course of a day, and an adult could handle 5-10. So it doesn't seem like there is a good margin of safety.
Overall a real risk to health for an insignificant amount of food that doesn't taste special. But a nice texture.
BigTTYGothGF 1 hours ago [-]
> contact dermatitis
Lots of food is like this, for example mangoes.
fellowniusmonk 54 minutes ago [-]
I eat foods with long history of co-evolution and domestication.
Barley and Yogurt, they are the dogs we domesticated from wolves that changed us too.
Daily barley water is a life changer, I don't think our digestive systems really function without a smidgen of daily barley.
19 minutes ago [-]
irishcoffee 2 hours ago [-]
"We still eat today" vs. "Someone consumed this today" is disingenuous at best.
Rendered at 18:08:29 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find sources for known age of species - is that information collected somewhere? Or is it something we often just don't know because of how sparse the fossil record is?
Wondering because of trying to look up the age of fern species I do eat (no cinnamon fern near me) and I can't find out.
That's simply due to the nature of evolution. It's nearly impossible to look at one past generation of chicken to the next to figure out when the ancestor was no longer a chicken. Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix.
Every generation is a new missing link. It's an extremely fuzzy process.
Afaik, T-Rex was never a direct ancestor of modern birds, including chicken. T-Rex and birds are theropod dinosaurs, but it was a very large and diverse group of animals.
It depends on what you mean by the age of the species. You can find the oldest known fossil occurrence at the Paleobiology Database [1] and the divergence time from molecular phylogenies via TimeTree [2].
[1] https://paleobiodb.org/
[2] https://timetree.org/
Then consider what's buried under the sea, totally inaccessible. Or under the ice at the poles.
It's a lot of fossils. And that's without even getting into questions like "what counts as a fossil for these purposes?", just any halfway sensible answer is going to leave you with an unfathomably big number, no need to even dig (ha, ha) into the specifics.
The places scientists go to dig up fossils are mostly where a particular stratum happens to exist (the crust gets recycled, so much of the oldest stuff is simply gone in most of the world) and happens to be exposed near the surface. Those same kinds of (for the more common strata, anyway) exist all over the place, just buried too deep to get at except, sometimes, during commercial excavation for things like mining (and then most of it's just gonna be destroyed without a look).
The number is both incalculable and vague - is a shark tooth enough to count as a fossil? How about diatoms and other microfossils?
Diatomaceous earth alone contains around 10^6-10^7 frustules (the shell of a diatom) per gram. If you count them as fossils then the lower bound is 10^18 fossils per year just in diatomaceous earth production.
People from other continents always surprise me with various fruits they taken for granted their entire life, but I've never heard about, and vice-versa.
Clearly, for instance Welwitschia (1) listed. I think this says a lot about location.
It's a fascinating plant, but it is an endangered species, endemic to the Namib desert. And as far as I know, not that commonly eaten.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welwitschia
On a side note there are 1000s even 10s of thousand of edible plant based species that grow on the earth. i don't know how old they are though.
I'm having trouble finding sources for other specific fern species, though many ferns have been around for hundreds of millions of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddlehead
Edit: transcript of a video about the sloth/avocado thing: https://nerdfighteria.info/v/jpcBgYYFS8o
The actual fruit (looks like a rotten plum, smells terrible) has ginkgolic acids which cause contact dermatitis (think poison ivy).
Then the nuts themselves contain Ginkgotoxin, which interferes with your B6, screwing up your nervous system and causing seizures. Cooking reduces but does not eliminate Ginkgotoxin.
I only ate one, and ate it raw. It was a delightful texture, but tasted like chewing random plant matter. Like leaves from a tree. Was maybe half a cubic centimeter of matter. Escaped any ill effects.
According to my research, kids can have seizures from as few as 10 nuts, which would probably be like 1.5 spoonfuls if you mashed them up. The guidelines I found don't seem very scientific but supposedly a kid can safely handle 3-5 nuts over the course of a day, and an adult could handle 5-10. So it doesn't seem like there is a good margin of safety.
Overall a real risk to health for an insignificant amount of food that doesn't taste special. But a nice texture.
Lots of food is like this, for example mangoes.
Barley and Yogurt, they are the dogs we domesticated from wolves that changed us too.
Daily barley water is a life changer, I don't think our digestive systems really function without a smidgen of daily barley.