The findings, which appear in this week's issue of the journal Science, provide the first evidence that land plants changed drastically during a period of sudden global warming 55 million years ago, said Jonathan Bloch, a University of Florida vertebrate paleontologist and member of the research team.
"It indicates that should we have a period of rapid global warming on that scale today, we might expect very dramatic changes to the biota of the planet, not just the mammals and other vertebrates, but forests also completely changing," said Bloch, who is a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus.
Scientists have known there was significant turnover in mammals during this rapid period of global warming called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, in which temperatures rose by perhaps as much as 10 degrees in the relatively short time span of 10,000 years, then lasting for another 80,000 to 100,000 years, Bloch said.
Global warming allowed mammals to emigrate across northern land bridges, marking the first appearance of perissodactlys in the form of the earliest known horse; artiodactyls, a group of even-toed ungulates that includes pigs, camels and hippos; as well as modern primates, he said.
But until now, no clues were available as to what happened to plants during this shift, considered one of the most extreme global warming events during the Cenozoic, the "Age of Mammals," Bloch said. "It was very puzzling because it looked like there was nothing going on with plants, which was rather strange and disconcerting."
Excavations by team leader Scott Wing, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institu
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Contact: Jonathan Bloch
jbloch@flmnh.ufl.edu
352-392-1721
University of Florida
10-Nov-2005