The trees that miss the mammoths (2011) (opens in new tab)

I have a huge Osage orange tree. Generally nothing eats them, but when the snow stays on the ground for weeks, and forms a crust of ice… eventually the squirrels will tear apart the fruit and eat a few of the hundreds of oranges. It might be that the squirrels using it as a famine food in anomalous weather years is enough to spread it.

In my neighborhood the big Osage oranges were planted in the late 1800s along the property lines, so they are long lived. A once in a hundred year weather event would be enough to keep a population going.

I’m kind of miffed that he didn’t include humans in the list of megafauna. Certainly Americans are over 100 pounds.

Being an anachronistic species is not necessarily an inevitable decline. I have a magnolia tree in my front yard — the leaves and petals are frustratingly indestructible, because it was once beetle-pollinated long before bees existed. I wonder how many anachronistic species will do well in the future changed climate. I know dawn redwood has a small range now, in China, but their fossils are found in Alaska.

There is a book on my reading list about this, "The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronsims", by Connie Barlow. I saw a review of it somewhere, and given the timing, it may be an expansion of the article.

Glad to see them take on the "pristine forest" thing, ecologies are complex open systems. Human activity doesn't do them any favors, for sure, but also there's no edenic prior state to which they can be returned. The only way out is forward.

Osage orange produces wood that is the 2nd hardest in America, behind the live oak. It's exceptionally resistant to decay and insect attack. I've seen osage fence posts that are at least 70 years old and are none the worse for wear. If we could breed a variety that grew straight, it'd be a great source of dense decay resistant timber. Interestingly, the common mulberry is one of its closest relatives, and its wood has similar properties (but usually smaller and not quite as hard / dense). It's too bad there isn't more research being done around osage orange and its potential commercial value. Perhaps genetic modification will help.

NZ has a lot of divaricated plants, as well as species that have a very unpalatable juvenile form of foliage, that changes to more efficient leaves once the tree is above a certain height.

There's a lot of discussion if these were adaptations to browsing by moa.

http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Bio32Tuat-t1-bo...

In my Texas childhood we called Osage oranges "horseapples" and fed them to horses. I'm not sure how effective this was at dispersing their seeds.

Good, except it propagates the notion that the marginal human presence at the time wiped out continent-spanning species.

The best evidence now is that a meteor strike on the Canadian ice shield wiped out most of the megafauna, and the Clovis culture, at one stroke, initiating the 1200-year Younger Dryas cold spell. The damage reached as far as Syria and southern Africa, leaving a layer of platinum-enriched dust.

Avocados are another seedpod (technically a berry, believe it or not) evolved to be eaten by mammoths and giant sloths. Unlike the osage orange, however, it didn't adapt to their extinction and would likely have gone extinct itself afterward, except for one saving grace: Mesoamerican humans thought they were delicious and started cultivating them.