Were dinosaurs eating fruit? Cretaceous Plant Power

As well as tasting good, fruit play a really important role in ecosystems across the world. But when did they evolve? Were dinosaurs eating them and dispersing them? In a fossil files first, we take a look at the evolution of plants, in particular the centuries long mystery of how and when the flowering plants (angiosperms) got going. A newly described site in New Mexico yields large and varied fleshy fossil fruits which upend how we think about Cretaceous ecosystems. The fossil fruits and seeds are orders of magnitude bigger than other Cretaceous fruit, indicating an active role of animals in their consumption and dispersal in complex forest environments. We also take a look at the story from pollen to reconstruct how and when angiosperms diversified, potentially in two pulses in the Cretaceous and after the Cretaceous. Plant Power!  The papers we look at this week are "Diversification of angiosperm reproductive strategies predated the end-Cretaceous extinction" by Jiamen Lee from Berkley and colleagues published Science in June 2026 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adw9457, "Pulsed evolution shaped extant angiosperm pollen disparity" by Yang Luo from Kunming and colleagues published in Nature Communications in January 2026 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68253-8, and "Integrated analysis of fossils and molecular divergence time estimates a latest Jurassic origin of angiosperms" by Ruolin Wu from Bristol and colleagues published in Nature Plants <span style= "font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-w