Avocados; an ecological anachronism

Leo Dong -

The avocado fruit evolved to be consumed whole by the megafauna that existed in the Cenozoic era[1]. Picture such animals as the woolly mammoth, giant rhino and and the giant sloth.

After the extinction of megafauna, the large seed to flesh ratio of the undomesticated variety would have made it a fairly unattractive food for more diminutive animals. How they were still extant by the time we humans started cultivating them is still a mystery[2].

  1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-avocado-should-have-gone-the-way-of-the-dodo-4976527/. ↩︎

  2. Barlow, Connie. (2000). The ghosts of evolution: nonsensical fruit, missing partners, and other ecological anachronisms. ↩︎