9 Living Things Waiting on Extinct Animals

An avocado grows a seed no living American animal can swallow. Evolutionary anachronisms: 9 plants and animals still built for extinct megafauna. In 1982, Daniel Janzen and Paul Martin argued in Science that a whole class of oversized American fruits are messages addressed to animals that died out at the end of the last ice age. This countdown works through nine living things you can walk up and touch — mesquite, pawpaw, Joshua tree, ginkgo, Osage orange, honey locust, avocado and the pronghorn — and asks what missing animal each one implies. Every entry travels with its objection: the ground sloth dung in Gypsum Cave, the 2025 Notiomastodon tooth residue, the deer that disperse honey locust pods about a kilometre, the Huaca Prieta avocado remains. And number one is the most famous version of this story ever told — the dodo and the tambalacoque — which is wrong, and worth knowing exactly why. Watch next: "Why Extinct Species Keep Turning Up Alive" #megafauna #naturalhistory #evolution Chapters: 0:00 The Seed in Your Hand 0:47 Where the Idea Came From 1:31 One Promise First 1:50 Evolution Has No Delete Key 2:30 9: Mesquite 3:31 8: The Pawpaw 4:53 7: The Joshua Tree 6:09 6: The Ginkgo 7:45 5: The Osage Orange 11:11 4: The Honey Locust 13:46 3: The Avocado 16:16 2: The Pronghorn 19:05 1: The Tambalacoque 22:50 What the Good Ones Share Image credits: "Record Street ginkgo MD1" by Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... "Maclura pomifera fruit, Tashkent" by Jamshid Nurkulov, CC BY-SA 4.0 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... "Gleditsia triacanthos spines Poland" by Joozwa, CC BY-SA 3.0 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... "Cuvieronius hyodon 1" by Ghedoghedo, CC BY-SA 3.0 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... "Notiomastodon platensis-Buenos-Aires-Argentina" by DagdaMor, CC BY-SA 4.0 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... "Geographic distribution and sample localities for Miracinony" by Molly Cassatt-Johnstone et al. (2026), CC BY 4.0 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... "DodoTree-Naturalis-PeterMaas2009" by Peter Maas, CC BY-SA 3.0 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...