How Humans Saved the Pumpkin from Extinction
Pumpkins and Squashes had a near-death experience in North America
Dr. Logan Kistler, a research fellow in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick, who did this work as a research fellow at Penn State University, thinks he knows why this happened. Small herbivores would have had difficulty eating these plants, but large animals like mastodons and gomphotheres would have had no difficulty with their toughness or taste, would have eaten them, and distributed their seeds in their dung.
But when these big herbivores went extinct, so nearly did the pumpkins and squashes. It was only because newly-arrived humans learned to farm them, and to breed tastier versions of them, that allowed many of these plants to survive.
Related Links
- Paper in PNAS
- Penn State University release
- Not Exactly Rocket Science blog
- Popular Science article