A large quantity of fossils from the period just before and during the last ice age have been discovered in French Guiana. The area changed from a species-rich mangrove system to a dry grassland savannah in a relatively short period of time. So writes an international group of researchers, including UvA scientists Carina Hoorn and Nina Witteveen, in the scientific journal PNAS.
Researchers discover 125,000-year-old coastal ecosystem underneath spaceport in Kourou phys.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from phys.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Scientists already knew that where the western Amazon rainforest sits today was once a vast wetland, almost four times the size of Texas and periodically flooded by pulses of seawater. Now, a new study posits that the source of these pulses was most likely the Caribbean Sea, and that there was another later and […]
The rainforests of Southeast Asia are home to iconic animals like the orangutans, rhinoceros, tigers and elephants. The canopy of gigantic trees provides a safe refuge for several plants and animals, some of which are found nowhere else in the world. These rainforests have four of the world’s 25 biodiversity hotspots, and constitute 15% of the world’s tropical rainforests. In
A tropical shrub called
Chrysobalanus icaco pushes up through Brazil’s white sandy beaches. The plant’s leathery oval leaves and tough silver bark give it the distinct appearance of a mangrove species, adapted to a life buffeted by saltwater. Strangely, though,
C. icaco also turns up more than a thousand miles inland, in the forests of the western Amazon. “We find fossil mangroves and associated coastal plants in the middle of the Amazon,” says paleoecologist Carina Hoorn, at the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands.
The shrub’s appearance inland with an assemblage of mangrove plants, noted in a 2019 article, is among the latest lines of evidence hinting that the Caribbean Sea flooded into the western Amazon during the Miocene, sometime in the last 10 to 20 million years (