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Fun idea. At least one correction for the table: For wila/bryorii fremonti's age of 250mya they cite the "geologic history" of... moss. Wila is a lichen, which is primarily fungal with algal symbiotes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryoria_fremontii And even given an edible moss, the fact that moss existed 250mya would not imply that particular species existed "morphologically unchanged". The "reindeer lichen" entry appears to have the same issue.
"morphologically unchanged" seems like a very low bar for lichen too. Are we talking like electron microscope slides that compare their microstructure? It seems like fossilized lichen will have a lot of morphological overlap between many species, possibly ones that aren't even lichen.
This guy parties
The pre-historic creatures suffered incredible evolutionary pressures. While the meteor strike was undoubtably significant, other weaknesses challenged them every step of the way. Early creatures were highly vulnerable when they ate, as well as when they went to the bathroom. The early dinosaur bird, The terodactyls was extremely vulnerable to Darwinian selection pressures when the bird urinated due to the high pitched urine noise. Evolutionary pressure resulted in the development of silent urination of the pterodactyls, hence the name change and the silent “p”.
If you don't restrict the list to living things, then salt and water are surely the oldest answers. :)
Hydrogen ions are edible, although usually dissolved in water. Hydrogen ions existed before oxygen or water
Don't forget dirt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagia#Humans
No fiddle heads?
Gnetum genom does not have a good fossil record, as is the case for many tropical species, but based on molecular clock data, the genus dates to the late Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (66 mya). Gnetum is a really weird gymnosperm, not a flowering plant, although it does produce fleshy "cones" (strobili). In Indonesia, the seeds are smashed and deep fried to make crisps called "emping".
Hands up who has ever eaten anything from that list!
I think this might say more about your geographic location than you think :)
People from other continents always surprise me with various fruits they taken for granted their entire life, but I've never heard about, and vice-versa.
Lotus root is pretty common in Chinese and Japanese cuisine. I've had it pickled and in a Sichuan dry pot. It's crunchy and takes on flavors pretty well.
Lotus root is pretty common. A crunchy tuber that keeps its texture after cooking, bland taste, unique visual appeal. I threw some in the last pot of bean chili my family made, and the kids liked it.
my wife and I regularly eat lotus root, it's quite delicious and common in chinese cooking. the others not so much.
On a side note there are 1000s even 10s of thousand of edible plant based species that grow on the earth. i don't know how old they are though.
Water caltrop nuts are common in Taiwan, very nutty and good for meat soups.
Whoever smelled a ginkgo fruit and said "let's eat this" !
Fiddleheads from ferns are available at farmer's markets in the spring in my area, though not from the cinnamon fern specifically.
I'm having trouble finding sources for other specific fern species, though many ferns have been around for hundreds of millions of years.
Apparently monkey puzzle nuts are great, I keep meaning to find some they do seem to seed around here sometimes but they are hard to reach.
Fern fiddleheads aren't bad if you get them at the right time, but I wouldn't go out of my way to eat them.
This is an interesting way to think about plants and animals.
I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find sources for known age of species - is that information collected somewhere? Or is it something we often just don't know because of how sparse the fossil record is?
Wondering because of trying to look up the age of fern species I do eat (no cinnamon fern near me) and I can't find out.
That's because when something becomes a new species is a surprisingly difficult and contentious debate in biology.
That's simply due to the nature of evolution. It's nearly impossible to look at one past generation of chicken to the next to figure out when the ancestor was no longer a chicken. Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix.
Every generation is a new missing link. It's an extremely fuzzy process.
> I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find sources for known age of species - is that information collected somewhere? Or is it something we often just don't know because of how sparse the fossil record is?
It depends on what you mean by the age of the species. You can find the oldest known fossil occurrence at the Paleobiology Database [1] and the divergence time from molecular phylogenies via TimeTree [2].
It's pretty tricky to find out, yeah. And new evidence is coming in all the time. All the methods are either floors (a fossil at X date proves a species existed then, but lack of fossils found yet might be inconclusive) or estimates (like molecular clock techniques). Dating fossils themselves (or rather the rocks they're buried in) isn't always easy or possible. For more out-of-the-way species, if anyone has bothered trying to figure out the age it's likely buried in scientific sources that are tricky for novices to find or search, and maybe under debate.
What you're looking for is the phylogenetic tree. Here's an explorable one: https://www.onezoom.org/
Keep in mind that the further you go back the bigger the error bars on these date estimates, and that a tidy split is an abstraction over a more messy reality (example: we know the hominid groups interbred, giving people with european ancestry some fraction of neanderthal dna).
People eat Horseshoe Crabs? No way, but their precious blood give me
'eaten as a delicacy in some parts of Asia' according to Wikipedia, but to be fair OP is only asserting possibilities anyway (the criteria are 1) old enough to have been around for dinosaurs to eat; 2) edible by humans).
Technically they eat the roe. Horseshoe crabs have very little meat and it’s so tough as to be practically inedible.
These aren't the Limulus Polyphemus of the North Atlantic, I think they mean one of the other (Pacific?) three or so species of horseshoe crab.
Though, were I a crab of any sort, anywhere, I'd live in terror of a hungry Cantonese chef...
> Ginkgo has been around so long, it predates the dinosaurs!
Isn't the first dinosaurs appeared like 400m years ago, but Ginkgo only 290m?
This is a confusion about what a "dinosaur" is. It is a particular branch of reptiles, not just an ancient one. The first dinosaurs were in the Triassic (roughly 240 mya). It was likely the Permian-Triassic extinction that opened the evolutionary niches for dinosaurs to evolve into (much like the Cretaceous extension event opened up the way for the mammals).
While there were creatures that looked like dinosaurs in the Permian period (298 mya) - creatures like the dimetrodon (the one with the sail on its back that you'd find next to dinosaurs in the museum - though the dimetrodon is of the branch that lead to mammals rather than reptiles) and early lizards and turtles - these aren't dinosaurs.
Seeing my neighbors gathering ginkgo nuts made me curious enough to try them, and I waded right in without understanding the risks! TLDR— they're not a great food source. It's yet another one of those cases where you have to wonder what "delicacy" means.
The actual fruit (looks like a rotten plum, smells terrible) has ginkgolic acids which cause contact dermatitis (think poison ivy).
Then the nuts themselves contain Ginkgotoxin, which interferes with your B6, screwing up your nervous system and causing seizures. Cooking reduces but does not eliminate Ginkgotoxin.
I only ate one, and ate it raw. It was a delightful texture, but tasted like chewing random plant matter. Like leaves from a tree. Was maybe half a cubic centimeter of matter. Escaped any ill effects.
According to my research, kids can have seizures from as few as 10 nuts, which would probably be like 1.5 spoonfuls if you mashed them up. The guidelines I found don't seem very scientific but supposedly a kid can safely handle 3-5 nuts over the course of a day, and an adult could handle 5-10. So it doesn't seem like there is a good margin of safety.
Overall a real risk to health for an insignificant amount of food that doesn't taste special. But a nice texture.
Reindeer lichen is not a moss (Wiki link), or even a Plantae...
I thought avocados were where old food eaten by dinosaurs or at least very large ancient rodents. I guess it doesn't meet the 100 million year old age mark.
Four of the eleven on the list are endangered (according to Wikipedia), so if they are still being eaten, they won't be for much longer.
The only thing I recongized from that list is the Lotus (and I don't eat it, though I remember hearing that some do).
Not sure the same crocodiles and sharks we have today were food back than, but current ones are delicious.
isn't Sago Palm (Cycas revoluta) highly toxic? i don't think it's edible...
I take Gingo three times a week, and eat Horseshoe Crab a few times a year.
Aren’t sea cucumbers 400M+ years old and common in Chinese cuisine?
I wonder if there are any fungi that would make that list?
I wonder what megafauna evolved to eat watermelon?
Birds are dinosaurs, and we eat a lot of chicken.
Avocado. I heard it was dinosaur food. Read an article somewhere that says Avacdo trees think that dinosaurs are still around.
Meat
The theory of evolution didn´t work on Horseshow crab?
Darwin did you read that. Maybe nasa should read it too :)
"We still eat today" vs. "Someone consumed this today" is disingenuous at best.