The catastrophe that ended the reign of dinosaurs may have also helped forests bloom with flowers that could better withstand the post-apocalyptic climate.

The prime suspect for killing the dinosaurs was a cosmic impact—the Earth was struck by a rock from space about 6 miles wide roughly 65 million years ago, near what today is the site of the small town of Chicxulub (CHEEK-sheh-loob), Mexico. This disaster would have released as much energy as 100 trillion tons of TNT, or more than a billion times the combined energy of the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leaving behind a giant crater more than 110 miles across. The giant tsunami, global wildfires, and dramatic cooling that happened after the asteroid or comet hit killed the dinosaurs (save for the ancestors of today's birds), paving the way for the rise of mammals.

And, according to a new study in PLoS Biology, a similar thing happened with plants. The Chicxulub mass extinction event devastated evergreen flowering plants, helping their seasonally flowering deciduous relatives take over.

The scientists analyzed 1,150 fossilized leaves of angiosperms (the flowering plants, excluding conifers) embedded in rock layers known as the Hell Creek Formation, found in North Dakota. The investigators used those fossils to reconstruct the ecology of a diverse plant community that lived during a 2.2 million-year period spanning the cataclysm, which researchers believe wiped out more than half of all plant species.

The team found that faster-growing deciduous plants replaced their slower-growing evergreen cousins to a large extent. Why? They suggest the cosmic impact led to a chaotically variable climate that favored plants that grew quickly and could take advantage of shifting condition. This could help to explain why modern forests are generally deciduous and not evergreen.

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