Asteroid impact on Patagonia plant life reveals new facts

There have been some preconceived notions about a mass extinction event 66 million years ago and its impact on Patagonia that will need to be rewritten following recent research.

An asteroid impact that killed off all the dinosaurs also killed off most of the plant life they depended on for food. The U.S. Science Foundation reported Elena Stiles from the University of Washington and her colleagues from Penn State examined 3,500 leaf fossils from two sites to determine how many species may have survived the event in the Cretaceous Period into the Paleogene Period. Scientists determined there may have been as much as 92% of the plant life that went extinct. The figure is much higher than previously thought. Despite the losses, the region’s plant life rebounded quickly.

"There's this idea that the Southern Hemisphere got off easier from the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction than the Northern Hemisphere because we keep finding plant and animal groups that no one thought survived," Peter Wilf, a geoscientist at Penn State said, U.S. Science Foundation reported. "We went into this study expecting that Patagonia was a refuge, and instead we found a complex story of extinction and rebound."