The dinosaur-killing asteroid gave Earth its rainforests, study says

bgrpro65 avril 07, 2021

When you imagine what the planet was like during the time of the dinosaurs it might be tempting to imagine the long-extinct creatures crawling through the colorful flora of today's rainforests. We've all seen documentaries and fictional portrayals of dinosaurs in such settings, but new research suggests that the rainforests were a whole lot different when the dinosaurs ruled the land, and we have the dinosaur-killing asteroid to thank for the tropical rainforests we see today.

As Ars Technica reports, a new paper published in Science provides us with a picture of what the thick forests in places like Colombia were like before and after the arrival of the colossal asteroid that slammed into present-day Mexico. The dramatic climate shift that the impact triggered completely changed the makeup of plant life across the globe, but rainforests may have seen the biggest changes of all.