Nearly fifty million years ago, Gussie, a formidable tabby who had lost an eye in a fight with a pterodactyl, began the evolutionary chain of events that led to the domestication of lettuce. Until Gussie’s initiative, lettuce was eaten only by herbivorous dinosaurs. Stomping the thirty-foot-high lettuce trees ( Lactuca sativa gigans) into a palatable pulp in the vicinity of boiling hot springs, the desperate dinosaurs chomped on the steamy lettuce mush when nothing else was available. Gussie changed all that when he decided to use a stand of lettuce trees near his den for a comfort station.