Love avocados? Thank the toxodon

Header image: The finicky fruit took some time to adapt to California’s climate. Print Collector via Getty Images

by Jeffrey Miller, Colorado State University

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Given avocado’s popularity today, it’s hard to believe that we came close to not having them in our supermarkets at all.

In my new book “Avocado: A Global History,” I explain how the avocado survived a series of ecological and cultural close calls that could have easily relegated them to extinction or niche delicacy. Instead, the avocado persevered, prospered – and became one of the most Instagrammed foods in the world.

Avocados are in the laurel family, the same group of plants that includes bay leaves and cinnamon. Laurel trees prosper in warm subtropical climates, and the avocado evolved in the warming climates of Central America during the Neogene period, roughly 10 million years ago.

During the Pleistocene era, which followed the Neogene, the biggest animals on Earth were what we call the megaherbivores – giant animals that subsisted almost entirely on a vegetarian diet. Most of these, like the giant ground sloth, would have dwarfed today’s largest megaherbivore, the African elephant. The giant herbivores of Pleistocene Mesoamerica like the gomphothere, the giant armadillo and the toxodon needed hundreds of pounds of food a day just to survive. Since food like leaves and grasses are so low in calories and fat, the animals prized any energy dense and fatty foods.

Enter: the avocado.

Megaherbivores didn’t peel the avocados and eat the green meat like we do today. Instead, their throats and digestive tracts were so large that they would simply swallow the avocado whole and excrete the undigested pit. In a process known as endozoochory, the pile of