Meet the potato's unexpected ancestor: the tomato. That's right, a fruit. Potatoes and tomatoes don't look alike, smell alike or taste alike, but in a study published Thursday in the journal Cell, scientists said that the potato evolved from a tomato ancestor around 9 million years ago.

Around 8 million years ago, an ancestor of modern tomatoes in South America hydridised with a plant called Etuberosum, and this reshuffling of genes gave rise to the potato