The Same Asteroid That Wiped Out Dinosaurs May Have Led to Creation of the Amazon Rainforest

In earlier research last month, it was shown how the extreme volcanism in the Deccan Trap was not responsible for the extinction. Researchers used fossilised pollen and leaves from Colombia to study how the impact changed South American tropical forests. Co-author of the study, Dr Mónica Carvalhofrom the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution in Panama, used fossilized pollen and leaves to characterize the changes that took place in northern South American forests at this time. Examining over 50,000 fossil pollen records and more than 6,000 leaf fossils from before and after the impact, the team of scientists found that cone-bearing plants called conifers and ferns were quite common before the massive asteroid struck the region that is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. A new form of plant species took birth after the asteroid impact and researchers say it was Angiosperm taxa that came to dominate the forests over the 6 million years of the recovery period when the vegetation began to resemble that of modern lowland neotropical forest.