According to a new study of fossilized leaves of angiosperms (flowering plants excluding conifers) published in the journal PLoS Biology, the massive asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago also boosted up fast-growing, deciduous plants.
by Sci-News.com
About 66 million years ago, a 10-km asteroid crashed into our planet near the site of the small town of Chicxulub in Mexico.
It left a crater more than 150 km across, and the resulting tsunami, wildfires, earthquakes and volcanism are widely accepted to have wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of the mammals.
The new study, carried out by U.S. scientists led by Dr Brian Enquist of the University of Arizona, reveals that the cataclysmic Chicxulub impact also decimated the evergreen flowering plants to a much greater extent than their deciduous peers.
The researchers were able to reconstruct the ecology of a diverse plant community thriving during a 2.2 million-year period (the last 1,400,000 years of the Cretaceous and the first 800,000 of the Paleogene) spanning the Chicxulub impact.
They found evidence that after the impact, deciduous angiosperms had replaced their slow-growing, evergreen peers to a large extent. Living examples of evergreen angiosperms, such as holly and ivy, tend to prefer shade, don’t grow very fast and sport dark-colored leaves.
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