What happened in the tropics during the last great extinction?

This animated short summarizes the findings of a research paper published in Science in 2021 titled “Extinction at the end-Cretaceous and the origin of modern Neotropical rainforests”. Using mixed media, it illustrates how 66 million years ago the impact of the asteroid that fell on Chicxulub caused a global ecological catastrophe that ended the age of the dinosaurs, and also gave rise to modern tropical rainforests. Before the great extinction, tropical forests contained a wide variety of ferns, conifers, and flowering plants that grew to form open canopies and harbored very specific insects. However, these forests were replaced by new rainforests dominated by flowering plants that grew to form dense, closed canopies where insects fed indiscriminately on all available plants. After the asteroid, these new rainforests resemble those living today in tropical latitudes and indicate that the late Cretaceous extinction was essential in the evolution of modern rainforests.

This project, produced in both Spanish and English in Colombia, is part of an interdisciplinary collaboration between paleobiologists, anthropologists and artists; and its funding comes from research grants from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the National Science Foundation.