The Briefing Room
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: mountaineer on October 14, 2018, 06:36:14 pm
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‘What’s up with the monkey balls?’ The story of Pittsburgh’s weirdest tree
It’s a tale of woolly mammoth poop, agricultural innovation, and evolutionary anomaly.
Rossilynne Culgan
Oct 13 2018 · 5:30 a.m.Shh … nobody tell the monkey ball trees.
Their dense, sticky fruit used to feed woolly mammoths 10,000-some years ago. The giant creatures are gone now, of course, but the trees don’t know that — and who among us would want to break their arboreal hearts?
So the trees continue each fall to drop their rubbery, green, brain-shaped fruits, assuming woolly mammoths or giant ground sloths will devour and digest them, spreading their seeds across the land and helping the trees expand their timber empire, said Joe Stavish, community education coordinator at Tree Pittsburgh. ...
The tree is officially named the maclura pomifera, and also goes by osage orange (that’s oh-sage, not aw-sage), hedge apple, horse apple, bow wood, yellow wood, or monkey brain tree. But many of its nicknames are confusing, because it’s not an orange or an apple tree, Stavish said.
“It’s a tree that has many common names,†Stavish said. “I don’t think anybody knows why the monkey ball name came about.â€
Maybe the name is some reference to monkey genitalia, he said, which are sometimes colorful, but the hypothesis can’t be proven. So the name “monkey ball†isn’t the scientific name, but it’s a Pittsburgh phrase, so in this article, we’re going to continue to refer to it as any yinzer would. ...
Mammoths, apparently, didn’t seem to have discerning palates. The gigantic mammals swallowed the fruit whole, rather than chewing up the seeds, meaning their waste perfectly preserved the seeds, allowing the trees to sprout in new places.
The trees, it seems, never learned that their metaphorical dining room was empty.
“It’s a tree that doesn’t really know that the mammoths have gone extinct,†Stavish said.
After mammoths, humans found new uses for the trees. ...
Full story and more pics (https://theincline.com/2018/10/13/whats-up-with-the-monkey-balls-the-story-of-pittsburghs-weirdest-tree/?fbclid=IwAR0ghFnaRN8vYUnfn-TFUt24mIffBymNPPE2ZAYcOQjcR3fQVVlOmYTYL-s)
(https://a.spirited.media/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/10/IMG_9314.jpg?resize=1024,576)
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We call them bois d'arc, pronounced bow-dark. We've got lots of them.
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Green cauliflower. Big deal.
(https://www.producemarketguide.com/sites/default/files/green-cauliflower_variety-page_0.png)
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Green cauliflower. Big deal.
(https://www.producemarketguide.com/sites/default/files/green-cauliflower_variety-page_0.png)
...if you're a woolly mammoth.
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Green cauliflower. Big deal.
I have a feeling these monkey balls taste a lot different from cauliflower! :laugh:
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My kids love that game.
(http://www.gogglebob.com/pics/fgc3/226level.gif)
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I have a feeling these monkey balls taste a lot different from cauliflower! :laugh:
You haven't asked my husband what he thinks cauliflower tastes like. :)
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Hmm. :pondering:
But seriously, I see these monkey balls squished all over the roads around here. Yuck.
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I grew up with the name Osage Orange, and the old wives tale was that the warded off spiders.
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I really thought monkeyballs would be a hotter topic than it is.
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I really thought monkeyballs would be a hotter topic than it is.
We only can work with what we're given! :laugh:
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(https://media.firebox.com/product/7137/column_grid_10/monkey-balls-liqueur_2824.jpg)