Impact of the terminal Cretaceous event on plant-insect associations.
نویسندگان
چکیده
Evidence for a major extinction of insect herbivores is provided by presence-absence data for 51 plant-insect associations on 13,441 fossil plant specimens, spanning the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary in southwestern North Dakota. The most specialized associations, which were diverse and abundant during the latest Cretaceous, almost disappeared at the boundary and failed to recover in younger strata even while generalized associations regained their Cretaceous abundances. These results are consistent with a sudden ecological perturbation that precipitated a diversity bottleneck for insects and plants.
منابع مشابه
No post-Cretaceous ecosystem depression in European forests? Rich insect-feeding damage on diverse middle Palaeocene plants, Menat, France.
Insect herbivores are considered vulnerable to extinctions of their plant hosts. Previous studies of insect-damaged fossil leaves in the US Western Interior showed major plant and insect herbivore extinction at the Cretaceous-Palaeogene (K-T) boundary. Further, the regional plant-insect system remained depressed or ecologically unbalanced throughout the Palaeocene. Whereas Cretaceous floras had...
متن کاملNovel Insect Leaf-Mining after the End-Cretaceous Extinction and the Demise of Cretaceous Leaf Miners, Great Plains, USA
Plant and associated insect-damage diversity in the western U.S.A. decreased significantly at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary and remained low until the late Paleocene. However, the Mexican Hat locality (ca. 65 Ma) in southeastern Montana, with a typical, low-diversity flora, uniquely exhibits high damage diversity on nearly all its host plants, when compared to all known local and reg...
متن کاملCenozoic insect-plant diversification in the tropics.
E volution has done wonders with mass extinctions. Organic diversity has rebuilt itself at least five times during the history of life on Earth, fashioning novelty from the organic remnants of each catastrophe (1). Modern biodiversity arose from a global extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period (the ‘‘K-T’’ extinction) that probably was caused by an asteroid or comet impact. This pe...
متن کاملFalse Blister Beetles and the Expansion of Gymnosperm-Insect Pollination Modes before Angiosperm Dominance
During the mid-Cretaceous, angiosperms diversified from several nondiverse lineages to their current global domination [1], replacing earlier gymnosperm lineages [2]. Several hypotheses explain this extensive radiation [3], one of which involves proliferation of insect pollinator associations in the transition from gymnosperm to angiosperm dominance. However, most evidence supports gymnosperm-i...
متن کاملThe impact of terminal heat stress on yield and heat tolerance of bread wheat
In arid and semi-arid regions of the world bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) yield is highlylimited due to late season heat stress, mostly occurring during the reproductive phase. Hence thecurrent study was conducted to evaluate the effect of late season heat stress on grain yield andyield components of 20 spring bread wheat cultivars. For this purpose, a stripe block experimentincluding four ...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید
ثبت ناماگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید
ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
دوره 99 4 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2002