While the famous meteorite that hit Earth millions of years ago doomed the dinosaurs, it actually helped other species, namely plants. New research shows that the same meteorite that caused dinosaurs to go extinct also decimated the evergreen flowering plants of the time, but the harsh conditions that followed the killer impact favored fast-growing, deciduous plants, and helped ancient forests bloom.
Scientists believe that a chunk of rock hit the Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico some 66 million years ago and triggered a series of natural disasters, such as tsunamis, wildfires, earthquakes and volcanic explosions, that subsequently wiped out the dinosaurs. Now, the new study, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology, reveals that the properties of deciduous plants helped them to better acclimate to these harsh post-apocalyptic climate conditions.
"When you look at forests around the world today, you don't see many forests dominated by evergreen flowering plants," study lead author Benjamin Blonder said in a statement. "Instead, they are dominated by deciduous species, plants that lose their leaves at some point during the year."
Blonder and researchers from the University of Arizona studied about 1,000 fossilized leaves found in North Dakota that date as far back as 1.4 million years during the Cretaceous period. Using a special biomechanical formula, the team was able to reconstruct the ecology of these angiosperms - flowering plants excluding conifers - that lived during a 2.2 million-year period spanning the cataclysmic impact event.
The scientists found evidence that after the impact, fast-growing, deciduous angiosperms had replaced their slower, evergreen peers to a large extent.
"Survival of the fittest doesn't apply - the impact is like a reset button. The alternative hypothesis, however, is that some species had properties that enabled them to survive," Blonder said.
In previous studies, scientists have found evidence of a dramatic drop in temperature caused by dust from the impact that, as Blonder says, "would have favored plants that grew quickly and could take advantage of changing conditions, such as deciduous plants."