| Title | Fossilized Tomatillos Discovered | |
| Date | Tuesday January 10 2017, @08:47AM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the in-bad-taste dept. | ||
Though tomatillos look a bit like tomatoes, they taste nothing like them. Also known as "ground cherries," these fruits are part of the diverse nightshade family, which includes everything from peppers and tobacco to tomatoes. Even so, scientists are largely still in the dark about their evolutionary origins.
The plants are fairly fragile, making it rare for them to fossilize. But while excavating a site in Argentina, a group of scientists from Pennsylvania State University struck botanic jackpot recently, uncovering a pair of fossil tomatillos [DOI: 10.1126/science.aag2737] [DX]—complete with their papery husks and the remains of their fleshy interiors. This find not only sheds new light on the tart but sweet fruit, but also suggest that they are much older than researchers once thought.
[...] For years, researchers have tried to fill in the gaps using genetic analysis to try to estimate how early the nightshade family branched off. But these 52 million-year-old fossils are much, much older than scientists once thought based on genetic analysis, as Charles Davis, director of the Harvard University Herbaria tells Smithsonian.com. "The ages for the nightshades was on the order of about 30 million years, and the tomatillo group is only about nine million years based on recent age estimates," Davis says. "Here you have a fossil now within this tomatillo group that's five times as old as what we thought."
Also at Penn State.
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printed from SoylentNews, Fossilized Tomatillos Discovered on 2024-04-19 03:11:18