Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction

Short Wave

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4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

Move over, TikTokers. It's time to shine a spotlight on some of the earliest influencers around: dinosaurs. When these ecosystem engineers were in their heyday, forest canopies were open and seeds were small. But around the time most dinosaurs were wiped out, paleontologists noticed an interesting shift in the fossil record: Seeds got bigger — much bigger. There was a fruit boom. Did the death of these dinosaurs have something to do with it? And who are the modern day equivalent of dinosaur influencers? To find out, host Emily Kwong talks to Chris Doughty, an ecologist at Northern Arizona University.

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0:18.7	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:24.9	Today, we are going back in time all the way to the Cretaceous period.
0:30.1	Here's what it looked like.
0:31.3	It would have been a very bright forest.
0:33.1	They would have been very open.
0:34.2	We have a lot of pine trees.
0:35.5	A time that Christopher Doty loves because of this one kind of dinosaur.
0:40.2	The seropods are the biggest terrestrial animal that's ever walked the earth.
0:45.5	Chris uses big data sets to understand ecosystems.
0:49.1	He's an associate professor of ecoinformatics at Northern Arizona University.
0:53.8	And he told me that saropods were so big, they acted like ecosystem engineers.
0:59.0	They can knock down trees. They can distribute nutrients. They can move seeds.
1:03.3	They do a lot of really important things. And big animals tend to do that differently than
1:07.0	small animals.
1:08.2	And the way saropods move nutrients and seeds around was through their poop.
1:12.5	Yeah, and their bodies.
1:13.9	The decaying corpse of a sarapod.
1:16.2	That's true.
	...

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