Large fruits and seeds didn’t evolve until after the mass-extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. At least, that’s what scientists have long believed.

But a new study in the journal Science casts that belief in doubt, finding that dinosaurs ate a lot more fruit than previously thought.

“This paper focuses on a fossil forest in New Mexico and the preserved fruits, seeds and other reproductive structures of the plants that lived there,” says co-author James Saulsbury, a postdoctoral researcher in the Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas. “These fossils change how we understand the way flowering plants became modern in terms of their reproductive ecology.”

Paleobotanists generally believed that flowering plants, which first appeared about 136 million years ago, evolved modern reproductive strategies only after dinosaurs died off at the close of the Cretaceous period.

Researchers said the fossils, preserved in volcanic ash at what has been described as a “botanical Pompeii,” provide a rare snapshot of an ancient forest ecosystem.

Among the discoveries were fossil fruits as large as grapes, unusually large for flowering plants of that period and evidence that modern reproductive strategies were already emerging during the late Cretaceous.

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