Osage orange

The Osage orange (Maclura pomifera, syn. aurantiaca) is a curious fruit not often talked about. The fruit are roughly spherical, but bumpy, and about ten centimeters in diameter. The color is a bright yellow-green; the overall appearance is similar to a bright green tennis ball.

This heavy, fleshy fruit appears not to be eaten by any animal native to North America. This is unusual as almost all large fleshy fruits' primary mode of seed dispersal is by consumption by large animals. One theory is that the osage orange fruit was eaten by a giant sloth that became extinct around the same time as the first human settlement of North America. As horses and other livestock will eat the fruit, and the horse evolved in North America, they have also been suggested as the trees' original disperser. Humans do not eat this fruit; where not eaten by horses, they are mostly left to rot where they fall from the trees, though they are occasionally sold as a cockroach or spider repellent. (This is either an error or simple fraud; the creatures ignore them.)

Osage orange trees were once common in North America; by the time the European colonists arrived, they were restricted to the Ohio and a few other river valleys in what is now the central United States. The trees picked up the name bois d'arc, or "bow-wood", because early French settlers observed the wood being used for bow-making by the Native Americans. The heavy and closely grained yellow-orange wood is also prized for tool handles. The sharp-thorned trees were frequently planted as fence-posts before the introduction of barbed wire.