Lo these many blog years ago the future Mrs. DarkSyde and I sat down to our first meet and greet. It seems odd to think that, back then, we were just another pair of awkward strangers hooked up by virtue of this newfangled contraption called an Internet. But as luck would have it, there was a magical extract available, refined from a strange, flowering plant discovered in the New World several hundred years earlier. Being relatively young and still fairly invincible, we threw caution to the wind and ingested a respectable quantity. The mysterious substance worked its neuro-magic, and soon we were fluttering our now blazing eyes at each other, and would go on to fall madly in love.
But that stuff wasn’t free of risk: Recent experience has shown long-term over-use is correlated with damage to almost every organ in the body. It can cause serious weight fluctuations and occasionally, even first-time users can suffer a life threatening condition involving full cardio-pulmonary failure!
So since it’s Valentine’s Day, what better segue into the topic of flowers and the wonderful—and dangerous—things we get from them?
If you happen to be strolling around 150 million years ago, you better not let your guard down. There are monsters here, big ones with giant pointy teeth. Embedded in the thick wet forests under rainy skies, all full of Jurassic monsters, it would be easy to miss the most important organism to evolve in millions of years. Mashed into a tangled bank near a creek you might catch a glimpse of the world’s first flower.
Paleo-botanists quibble about the earliest flowering plant. But there is solid evidence in the fossil record for flowering plants going back at least 125 million years. Up until then, most big plants were gymnosperms, meaning “naked seed,” like modern day pine trees. But these new plants were angiosperms, meaning clothed seeds. And the new plants soon hit on an ingenious survival strategy: Rather than trying to avoid or discourage predators with camouflage or poison, they lured them in with a tasty wrapper around the seed which animals would ingest, transport, and later deposit in a freshly brewed patch of homemade fertilizer.
This was a big hit with everything from tiny insects to the largest animals to ever walk the planet. By the time non-avian dinosaurs were escorted off the stage by evolution and impacts 65 million years ago, the new plants had spread far and wide and diversified greatly. And they weren’t done yet, their next big hit was grasses. Grass might seem humble enough, but the evolution of grass and the prairies they made possible gave rise to a whole new ecology of grazers and predators.
Grass made the mega-fauna of the ice ages possible. Thanks to this reliable, abundant source of food, massive mammals evolved. Grass gave us the world of indricotheres, many times heavier than an elephant and twice as tall as a giraffe. These giant grazers were preyed on by some of the largest, warm-blooded predators to ever walk on land, like the Andrewsarchus, a sort of carnivorous hoofed critter distantly related to modern day hippos and whales.
Nowadays, we are arguably even more dependent on a number of grass species for our day-to-day survival than those ancient beasts. Humans consume a couple of trillion calories in the form of cereal grains every day, probably over a trillion in rice alone. Every pound of beef represents at least 10 or more pounds of feed, which is mostly made of oats, another grass. Add to this the citrus fruits, nuts, and various vegetables we eat, all members of the angiosperm taxon, and it’s fair to say humans are flower-powered and ultimately, solar-powered.
Of course the new plants could never fully trust their animal partners—especially insects. A hungry horde of locusts would gobble down the whole plant given half a chance. So some plants evolved chemical defenses in addition to thorns and camouflage. The message was clear: eat the wrong part of the plant or eat it at the wrong time of year, and you get a serious stomach ache or worse. Some of our most useful substances come from those defenses: Caffeine from the coffee bean, quinine from tree bark, and narcotic pain killers from the opium poppy, just to name a few.
Which brings me back to that first date with Mrs. DarkSyde, and the sublime substance we ingested at the end of the go-go 90s. It was discovered a few hundred years ago in the New World and brought back to Europe, where it became a bit of a sensation at one time or another. It was hard to make, it seemed to be almost addictive, and some users even said it was better than sex! The source was a strange flowering plant. Native Americans in modern-day Mexico used the large, enigmatic beans that grew directly off the stalks to make various fermented and regular beverages. The Aztecs called this lovely substance xoco-latyl.
But today, we know it as chocolate.