May I have your attention please you can now book your train tickets on Uber and get

10% back in credits to spend on your next Uber ride so you don't have to walk home in the brain again.

Trains, now on Uber. T's and C's apply. Check the Uber app. This is

This is Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Suzanne Bard.

Peter Bruegel's iconic 1565 painting, The Harvesters, hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The work depicts peasants cutting stocks of wheat nearly as tall as they are.

Nowadays, if you walk through a wheat field, you basically see that wheat is about me height.

The short statue is essentially a consequence of breathing from the second half of the 20th century.

University of Ghent biologist Eve DeSmet.

Selective breeding favored genes for reduced height because they came along with

genes for increasing yields to feed a growing population.

Desmette says wheat is just one example of how historical artwork can allow us to track

the transformation of food crops over time.

He teamed up with art historian David Frahauer of Amaranth

to catalog such artwork from around the world.

We have been mainly looking at things where we kind of can spot changes in shape, in color, in size.

Friends since childhood, their interest in plants in artwork began with a visit to the Hermitage

Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, where they noticed an odd-looking

watermelon in an early 17th century painting by Flemish artist, Fron Sniders.

So if you think of a watermelon, you cut it it through it should be dark red on the inside, but that one appeared to be pale and white.

Biologist De Smet assumed the painter had done a poor job, but art historian Frahauen had a different idea.

And he says, no, this is one of the best painters ever from that era.

...