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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.”
The dinosaur-killing asteroid reshaped Earth s tropical forest sciencenews.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sciencenews.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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VIDEO: What happened in the tropics when an asteroid hit the planet and how did it shape today s rainforests? view more
Credit: Monica Carvalho
Tropical rainforests today are biodiversity hotspots and play an important role in the world s climate systems. A new study published today in
Science sheds light on the origins of modern rainforests and may help scientists understand how rainforests will respond to a rapidly changing climate in the future.
The study led by researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) shows that the asteroid impact that ended the reign of dinosaurs 66 million years ago also caused 45% of plants in what is now Colombia to go extinct, and it made way for the reign of flowering plants in modern tropical rainforests.
Scientific American
The Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs Created the Amazon Rain Forest
Fossilized pollen and leaves reveal that the meteorite that caused the extinction of nonavian dinosaurs also reshaped South America’s plant communities to yield the planet’s largest rain forest
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View of the Amazon rain forest at Amacayacu National Natural Park in Colombia in 2010. Credit: Mayela Lopez
Dinosaur and fossil aficionados are intimately familiar with the meteorite strike that drove
Tyrannosaurus rex and all nonavian dinosaurs to extinction around 66 million years ago. But it is often overlooked that the impact also wiped out entire ecosystems. A new study shows how those casualties, in turn, led to another particularly profound evolutionary outcome: the emergence of the Amazon rain forest of South America, the most spectacularly diverse environment on the planet. Yet the Amazon’s bounty of tropical species and habitats now face their own existential threat because o
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