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Sixty-six million years ago, a gigantic asteroid crashed into Earth, wiping out all kinds of life and changing the trajectory of the planet.
It was bad news for dinosaurs. But in the tropical rainforest, their loss was flowers’ gain, a new study in the journal Science suggests.
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An international team of researchers used tens of thousands of fossils to explore what happened to plant life in what is now Colombia after the impact. Their work reveals that the crash was probably responsible for the modern makeup of tropical rainforests.
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Today’s tropical rainforests came about because of the huge asteroid strike thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs.
Before the asteroid hit the Yucatán peninsula in what is now Mexico, South America’s rainforests were made up of vastly different greenery than the abundance of flowering plants they now contain.
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“If you returned to the day before the meteorite fall, the forest would have an open canopy with a lot of ferns, many conifers and dinosaurs,” says Carlos Jaramillo at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “The forest we have today is the product of one event 66 million years ago.”
In an analysis of thousands of fossil pollen and leaves spanning the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary, researchers found that the cataclysmic asteroid impact that resulted in the destruction of nearly 75% of all terrestrial life on Earth drastically restructured tropical forests, setting the stage for the evolution of what has become one of the planet s most diverse ecosystems - the neotropical rainforest.