Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

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This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

This Halloween, as you carve jack-o-lanterns and make pumpkin pie,

take a moment to appreciate just how far the humble pumpkin has come.

The wild form of a pumpkin is about the size of a tennis ball, and it tastes like one.

It's incredibly bitter, it's got a very hard rind, and it's extremely

unpalatable to humans. Logan Kistler, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of

Natural History. He says, as unpalatable as those early squashes were, they made a tasty tidbit

for mastodons. And we know that because there are deposits of mastodon dung in Florida that are over 30,000 years old.

And so in those mastodon dung deposits, sure enough, what we can find are wild squash seeds.

Kistler says mastodons probably weren't put off by the Gord's bitter taste.

Because a few years back, his team analyzed the genomes of more than 40 mammals.

And they found that the larger the animal, the fewer

copies of a bitter taste perception gene they tended to have. And turns out this is an absolutely

beautiful correlation between body size and the ability to taste bitter compounds. And so what we think

is going on is that these are really plants adapted for a landscape with large herbivores.

They've evolved this bitter toxicity

in order to deter small mammals who would destroy the seeds, but they've evolved it at just the

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