A new study suggests that the asteroid responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs from Earth also gave birth to the Amazon rainforest.
Scientists Find New Evidence For The Origin Of Amazon Rainforest
The researchers found new data after analysing thousands of fossil pollen and leaves. The data showed that the cataclysmic asteroid that became the destruction for almost 75 percent of all terrestial life on Earth also drastically restructure the tropical forests.
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The study suggests that the stage for the evolution of Earth’s most diverse ecosystems – the neotropical rainforest was the child of the asteroid. The end-Cretaceous impact occured nearly 66 million years ago.
However, the origins of the rainforests remained a mystery for a very long time. This was mainly due to the fact that there was less amounts of palaeobotanical research in the ares. And it has just begun to provide information for the questions that have been around a long time.
Study Discovers Extinct Seed Bearing Plants
As per the findings from the study, the late Cretaceous rainforests were divided by the open canopy environment.
Monica Carvalho from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution along with some colleagues studied the fossil pollen and leaves from Colombia. They studied their impact over the changing South American tropical forests which also led to finding large scale changes in the compositions and sturctures of various species and forests.
Furthermore, the study noted a decline by 45 per cent at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary and the extinction of some of the seed bearing plants. As the forests recovered over the nexr six million years after the destruction, many kd the flowering plants came to existence and spread across the forests.
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And this ultimately led to the transition of a closed canopy structure with layered and vertical distribution of plant biodiversity that now the modern tropical rainforests follow.
