Potatoes evolved from tomatoes

Varieties of potatoe. Image: Yuxin Jia and Pei Wang

The delicious, nutritious potato evolved from an ancestor of the tomato, one presumably just as slimy and pointless as the contemporary model. "This wasn't obvious," say the researchers who learned this.

The divergence occured nearly 9 millions years ago, according to a paper published in Cell, from wild…