When a 10 kilometer diameter meteorite hit the Yucatan peninsula that lead to the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago, in an almost serendipitous event, plants and forests flourished on Earth, researchers say. 

The meteorite impact that wiped out the dinosaurs was in fact favorable to the growth of decidious plants or seasonal plants that shed off their leaves during autumn and destroyed evergreen plants that grow at a much slower rate, according to researchers from the University of Arizona.

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This property of deciduous plants known today is linked back to this particular event where they responded and adapted more quickly to different climate conditions especially post-apocalyptic ones.

The team has gathered a myriad of samples of fossilized leaves of these angiosperms or flowering plants that do not include conifers. Applying a unique biomechanical formulae enabled them to reconstruct a diverse plant community from a period spanning 2.2 miilion years where that meteorite catastrophe occured that is believed to have killed half of the Earth's plant species. 

The samples were taken from the Cretaceous period from its last 1,400,000 years and the first 800,000 years into the Paleogene period.

Researchers have discovered that these deciduous plant species are faster growing than their evergreen counterparts which are slow to bloom. 

According to Benjamin Blonder from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, the majority of forests today are mostly populated by deciduous species which are seasonal ones that lose their foliage during a certain time every year as opposed to evergreen flowering plants. 

Whenever this kind of catastrophic event happens, it resets the ecology of all plant life and proves that the survival of the fittest reigned among the deciduous species because they possessed properties that helped them survive.

This study is published in the journal PLOS Biology.

TagsMeteorite That Wiped Out Dinosaurs Actually Helped Forests Flourish, meteors, meterorites, asteroids, meteorite killed dinosaurs helped forests bloom