Researchers has recently hypothesized that, a 10-km diameter chunk of rock that hit the Yukatan peninsula 66 million years ago, which wiped out the dinosaurs also helped modern forests to bloom.
Researchers from the University of Arizona revealed that the meteorite impact that spelled doom for the dinosaurs also decimated the evergreen flowering plants to a much greater extent than their deciduous peers. They assumed that the properties of deciduous plants made them better able to respond rapidly to chaotically varying post-apocalyptic climate conditions.
Applying biomechanical formulae 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.
The fossilized leaf samples span the last 1,400,000 years of the Cretaceous and the first 800,000 of the Paleogene. The researchers found evidence that after the impact, fast-growing, deciduous angiosperms had replaced their slow-growing, evergreen peers to a large extent.
Benjamin Blonder said that there are not many forests dominated by evergreen flowering plants in today's world, instead, they are dominated by deciduous species, plants that lose their leaves at some point during the year.
A mass extinction caused by catastrophic event such as a meteorite impacting Earth all species are equally likely to die, so survival of the fittest doesn't apply and the impact would be like a reset button, however, the alternative hypothesis, could be that some species had properties that enabled them to survive.
The study is published in the open access journal PLOS Biology.