When asteroid slammed the Yucatš¢n peninsula in what is now Mexico, 66 million years ago, it is said to have wiped out dinosaurs, in addition to 75% of the total plants and animals.?
While it may have caused mayhem, the event was responsible for?the emergence of the iconic Amazon rain forest of South America, the most spectacularly diverse environment on the planet, a new study said.?
The paper titled?Extinction at the end-Cretaceous and the origin of modern Neotropical rainforests, published in the?Science journal?this month, suggests that the origin of modern rainforests can be traced?to the?immediate aftermath of the asteroid strike.?
Researchers analyzed tens of thousands of fossils of pollen, spores and leaves, collected from various sites across Colombia, that were dated to between 70 million and 56 million years ago.? ??
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The study suggests the end of the Cretaceous was a real turning point in the structure and composition of this environment.?
¡°A single historical accident changed the ecological and evolutionary trajectory of tropical rainforests,¡± says Carlos Jaramillo, a paleopalynologist and co-lead author of the study.?
¡°The forests that we have today are really the by-product of what happened 66 million years ago," he added.?
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But after the devastating impact, plant diversity declined by roughly 45% and extinctions were widespread, particularly among seed-bearing plants.??
While the forests recovered over the next six million years, angiosperms, or flowering plants, came to dominate them.??
It took millions of years for the diversity of the forest to recover after the mass extinction event, which ¡°should be a clear warning against deforestation and the rate at which we are currently intervening on the planet,¡± says?Mš®nica Carvalho, co-lead study author of the study.
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