Meteorite That Doomed Dinosaurs Remade Forests

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Meteorite That Doomed Dinosaurs Remade Forests

By Daniel Stolte, University Relations - Communications | September 16, 2014

The impact decimated slow-growing evergreens and made way for fast-growing, deciduous plants, according to a study applying biomechanical analyses to fossilized leaves.

The meteorite impact that spelled doom for the dinosaurs 66 million years ago decimated the evergreens among the flowering plants to a much greater extent than their deciduous peers, according to a study led by UA researchers. The results are published in the journal PLoS Biology.

Applying biomechanical formulas to a treasure trove of thousands of fossilized leaves of angiosperms — flowering plants excluding conifers — the team was able to reconstruct the ecology of a diverse plant community thriving during a 2.2 million-year period spanning the cataclysmic impact event, believed to have wiped out more than half of plant species living at the time.
....

"When you look at forests around the world today, you don't see many forests dominated by evergreen flowering plants," said the study's lead author, Benjamin Blonder, who graduated last year from the lab of UA Professor Brian Enquist with a Ph.D. from the UA's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and is now the science coordinator at the UA SkySchool. "Instead, they are dominated by deciduous species, plants that lose their leaves at some point during the year."

Plant Ecological Strategies Shift Across the Cretaceous–Paleogene Boundary

[defacto7]

1. Except...

Evergreens grow faster than their deciduous peers. They live longer, but grow faster.

So what is their point? Then they said the study excluded conifers. What?

"When you look at forests around the world today, you don't see many forests dominated by evergreen flowering plants,"

Are these people for real? Maybe they need to study up on the human history of deforestation from 1000 BCE to 1000 ACE.