I rather suspect that Barlow skimmed through Cook’s 1982 essay on tropical fruits, which talks about the avocado being full of “acids and tannins, that render the flesh bitter to human taste”, and thought he was talking about the seeds. When in fact he was talking about the unripe fruit.
A general guide is that you read “Ghosts of Evolution” for a nice narrative. Not for particular facts. When you try to pin down Barlow’s statement that “The avocado’s oily flesh is attractive to this otherwise strict carnivore”, i.e. the jaguar, and check the citations, it comes down to “something that everyone knows so no need for data”.
She accepts the fable of the giant New Zealand Gecko Hoplodactylus delcourti:
Bones of an extinct giant gecko, discovered in the 1980s, confirm the presence of a reptile large enough to have consumed the karaka fruit, whose seed is too big to be swallowed by any living animal native to the islands.
Again, it’s a nice story, but it’s bullshit. Some explorer brought back the skin of a giant gecko, and left it in a French museum, to be found a century later, but there’s simply no evidence that it came from NZ.
