Psychedelics are the shit. Not only are they a ton of fun, new research is proving that they have tremendous mental health benefits and they are also a ton of fun and so much fun to do.
Have you ever tried them? Don’t knock them until you’ve tried them. Because that’s some sort of stunt my mother would pull. “Psychedelics are bad for you, David,” she’d say, despite the fact that she never once tripped in her freaking life.
So lame, mom. So lame.
But not only am I doing shit people did back in the 60s, I’m doing shit pretty much every animal on Earth, mammalian and reptilian, have done since the beginning of time.
Because you know who liked to get fucked up on some mushrooms and listen to some Hendrix? The dinosaurs.
Millions of years before LSD and rock and roll, dinosaurs munched on psychedelic fungus, a new study suggests. The hints that dinos got high come from the first amber fossil ever found of ergot, a grass parasite that can have poisonous and mind-altering effects on animals that nibble the dark fungi.
This was some serious shit. The kind you got on Hippie Hill back in the day. (In case you were wondering, during the Mesozoic Era, California was mostly underwater, so dinosaurs definitely weren’t traipsing through the Haight high as hell).
The drug they were eating was what LSD was eventually derived from, so you know it’s Legit as Fuck (LAF).
Ergot provided the precursor to LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide). And people who eat ergot-contaminated rye (or other ergot-tainted grains) develop powerful muscle spasms and hallucinations. The phrase “St. Anthony’s Fire” refers to both ergotism and the horrible burning feeling that ergot triggers by constricting blood vessels.
Previously, it was thought that ergot was not around at the time of the dinosaurs, but new fossils have proved that assumption to be false.
Now, it turns out that ergot has plagued grass-eaters since dinosaurs stomped the Earth. The hunk of amber from Myanmar encases an exquisitely preserved ergot fungus, perched atop a grass spikelet that grew about 100 million years ago, researchers report in the 2015 issue of the journal Palaeodiversity.
Evidence is mounting that grasses evolved alongside the dinosaurs, rather than after the giant reptiles disappeared.
And a science dude says, yea, sure, fuck it, dinosaurs probably tripped balls.
“It indicates that psychedelic compounds were present back in the Cretaceous,” [George Poinar Jr., a zoology professor at Oregon State University] told Live Science. “What effect it had on animals is difficult to tell, but my feeling is dinosaurs definitely fed on this grass.”
Fuck yea man, dinosaurs. I feel you. I feel you so hard right now. Although that may just be the drugs.