While conventional knowledge suggests that rice originated about 25 million years ago, the new discovery leads to a different antiquity of rice. Analysing fossilised poops of 40-ft long and 13-ton plant-eating dinosaur that roamed Indian territory, scientists claimed that rice originated about 63 million years ago.
“Modern rice varieties, the wild type, were also present at the time of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago,” Ashok Sahni from Lucknow University, the senior-most fossil hunter in the team, told Deccan Herald. The findings have been published in Nature Communications.
The dinosaur which ate rice along with grass are known as Titanosaurus, whose fossils were first found in a sedimentary rock region in central India more than 100 years ago. Over the years many dinosaur fossils, including fossilised dino dung, were dug up from that area, known as Pisdura in Chandrapur district.
The poop fossils suggest that the entire grass family – not just rice – may have originated much earlier than what is believed at the moment. Rice branched out from the family millions of years earlier.
Grasses evolved between 107 and 129 million years ago, which is more than 30 million years before known timescale, said co-author Dhananjay Mohabey, who heads the palaeontology division at the Geological Survey of India, Nagpur.
Taking the same logic on reverse gear, they argued forefathers of many modern plants had come into being much earlier. These include flowering and fruit trees as well as plants which use carbon- di-oxide more efficiently for photosynthesis.
There are two theories on the branching out of rice from the grass family.
The team comprising Indian, US and Chinese scientists felt that the separation and subsequent spread of rice species might have taken place before the loss of land bridge between India and the rest of the Gondwana continent about 80 million years ago.
“This scenario is more concordant with our views,” they said.
“Our findings radically change concepts about rice evolution, specially when one considers the fact that India at that time was still south of the equator in the southern hemisphere having broken free from Madagascar,” Sahni said.
The study might lead to a much better understanding about the evolution of mammals and the prevailing climate at that point of time, said Mohabey.