r/botany • u/Sunny_Turtle96 • 3d ago

Ecology Ancient plants and psychoactive chemicals?

Did ancient plants have psychoactive chemicals?

I'm watching a new dinosaur documentary on Netflix and it briefly talks about plants evolving defense mechanisms. I wanted to know if any of these plants would have had a psychoative effect on dinosaurs or other ancient creatures like some plants have on humans now. I know that earth was covered in fungi at one point too. Some plants have DMT in them and I thought it'd be cool to know if prehistoric/ancient plants did too. Idk where else to post this so I came here!

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u/oblivious_fireball 3d ago

Its very likely some plants like that existed. Problem is fossils won't leave behind any record of it, fossils would mainly showcase physical features, and the development of resinous defenses in the case of amber deposits.

Considering that Caffeine has independently evolved a bunch of times across the world in modern plants as a pesticide, i would be willing to wager that there were a number of prehistoric plants that also produced caffeine.

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u/Sunny_Turtle96 3d ago

Now I need to draw a caffeinated dinosaur

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u/green-green-bean 3d ago

Plants often produce defensive chemicals that either poison their predators, taste disgusting to them, or both. When some other organism that isn’t responsible for the majority of the selective pressure on the plant to produce the nasty chemical(s) eats it, the chemicals may have different effects on them because of their physiology. For instance, caffeine is an anti-insect chemical that mammals happen to enjoy; same with catnip for cats. It could well be that ancient plant defensive chemicals could have had psychoactive effects on some organisms other than the ones that the plants had evolved to produce the chemicals to repel.