On Super Bowl Sunday, Americans eat 26 million avocados in our guacamole. Annually, we average 8 pounds of avocados per person.

A third of the world’s supply comes from Mexico, which is where the avocado developed.

It began as a small black fruit called the criollo from the same family of trees that produce bay leaves and cinnamon.

The fruit was a favorite of giant herbivores, similar to today’s rhinos and elephants. They would ingest the fruit and poop out the seed, propagating the trees.

When those animals went extinct, the criollo might have too. Except, 10,000 years ago, humans began to propagate it.

Early Mexicans picked the best fruits and grew trees from them. Over generations, this upward selection gradually turned the modest criollo into the large, meaty avocado we know today.

But it wouldn’t grow well in the colder US. until a mailman named Rudolph Hass crossed Mexican and Guatemalan trees in his California orchard to create the breed that bears his name: the Hass avocado.

Eighty percent of avocado trees in the US descend from his one mother tree.

Besides being delicious, avocados decrease your risk of heart disease and lower your bad cholesterol while increasing your levels of good cholesterol. All good reasons to eat one.

When you do, you can thank a prehistoric rhino, the Maya and a California mailman.