Anachronistic Fruits and the Ghosts Who Haunt Them

[elainegrey]

Anachronistic Fruits and the Ghosts Who Haunt Them
http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.edu/pdf/articles/618.pdf

Given the extinction of megafauna in the Americas, what might have happened to the flora that depended on the megafauna for dispersal?

Fascinating article, recommended! (gurdonark & adamantine1 come first to mind.)

Comments

[weofodthignen]

Finally managed to read this :-) Yes, that is interesting, and scary. (For one thing, we have so much panic, sometimes justified, about introduction of alien species nowadays that I'm not at all sure it will be feasible to try to save species like the Florida torreya by transplantation. One has only to think of kudzu, and when people hear "yew-like fruit" they tend to think "will poison kids.") It's been years since I thought about osage oranges - probably since I lived in Kansas - and I think I will now look up the Wikipedia entry and see whether it needs this article adding as a reference or whether it can tell me how widely they are banned as street trees. In addition to the fruits' having a bad habit of damaging cars or even causing accidents when they drop, I understand they smell bad to those who, unlike me, still have working noses? But they are kind of cute and supposedly keep crickets out of basements :-) And I've forgotten what their leaves look like. I also don't think I ever knew they are the same thing as bois d'arc, which is one of those tree names I encounter in fiction without ever koping to know what's meant.

Food for thought. I'd like to see elephants wandering Shoreline Park, but I doubt many others would.

M

PS: That article is so bumpy in style, I have an awful suspicion it started life in the 1911 Britannica. If I have time I'll see if I can rewrite the descriptive and uses sections to avoid that impression. I also note they reference the "vanished dispersers" theories but not the specific article; it maybe should be added. And nothing about its status as a street tree. I should track that down, I recall an article in the Salina Journal.