More than half of all plant species went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period, according to new analysis that could influence modern conservation efforts. Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid the size of San Francisco crashed into a shallow sea off the coast of modern-day Mexico and plunged the world into an extinction event that killed off as much as 75 percent of life, including the dinosaurs.
But a debate remains about how the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction (K-Pg) impacted plant life on land, in part because global studies of the fossil record have shown that no major plant families went extinct. A new analysis of emerging fossil data from North and South America sheds light on how plants fared during the K-Pg boundary and points to a true plant extinction.
“There has been a trend in the literature to say maybe this event was bad for the dinosaurs and lots of marine life, but it was fine for plants because the major groups survived,” said Peter Wilf, professor of geosciences at and lead author. “Our review counters that idea, because everywhere we looked, more than half of the species went extinct.”