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 66 gingko DHJanzen100728.jpg high resolution
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| Newly fallen gingko fruits, with their large SOFT seeds stripped out and put on the pavement in front of the leaf. What do we have here? A large soft fruit, with large soft seeds, dropped to the ground as a presentation to an animal. What animal? Gingko evolved long before there were mammals larger than mice. Fruit pigeons, like the large pigeons that eat fruits this size in southeast Asian rainforest, birds similar to our passenger pigeons? There were no pigeons 100 million years ago, and there may not even have been something that you would call a bird. One day pawing, at the teeth of a large herbivorous dinosaur in the Smithsonian, it dawned on me that these were slicing/chopping teeth - great for cutting up foliage, but not the kind of molar mill that would grind seeds to a fine pulp. | ||
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