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1 .This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata. Got a minute?
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2 .Sixty-six million years ago, the Chicxulub meteorite, a rock over six miles wide, slammed into the Earth.
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3 .And you know what happened next, the dinos disappeared.
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4 .But Benjamin Blonder, a plant ecologist at the University of Arizona, says to consider the big picture for a moment.
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5 ."You have to think not only about the charismatic animals which are walking on the planet, but also all of the resources on which those animals are depending. "
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6 .Say, for example, vegetation.
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7 .Blonder has been giving those overshadowed impact victims their due.
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8 .After all, more than half the plant species in temperate North America perished along with the dinosaurs.
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9 .And the type of plants that thrived after the impact were different as well.
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10 .Blonder and his colleagues studied thousands of fossil leaves from North Dakota, spanning about a million years both before and after the impact.
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11 .They measured leaf mass per area, a proxy for how much energy a plant invests in its leaves,
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12 .and the density of veins, which indicates how fast-growing the leaf is.
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13 .Sturdy, slow-growing leaves tend to be evergreens, whereas flimsy, fast-growing leaves are a hallmark of deciduous plants.
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14 .Turns out that after the impact, the fossil record has more deciduous-looking leaves,suggesting that fast-growing, more adaptable seasonal plants beat out the competition after the big hit.
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15 .The study appears in the journal PLoS Biology.
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16 .And it kinda makes me wonder if we haven't overlooked another theory for why the dinos died out, maybe they just didn't care for the taste of deciduous leaves?
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17 .Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.
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