Botanists call any fleshy fruit with its seeds inside a “berry.” An avocado has one giant seed surrounded by buttery green flesh and a thin skin, which makes it a berry - specifically, a single-seeded berry. That huge pit you scoop out is the whole point of the fruit.
Avocado trees solve a strange puzzle: that pit is way too big for any modern animal to swallow and carry away. Scientists think avocados evolved to be eaten by giant ground sloths, mammoths, and other huge Ice Age animals that could gulp them whole and poop the seeds out somewhere new.
Those animals all went extinct around 13,000 years ago, so wild avocados should have died out too. They survived because humans started growing them on purpose. Today nearly all avocados sold worldwide are the same type - Hass - and they all come from one single tree planted in California in the 1920s.
