No Consistent Shift in Leaf Dry Mass per Area Across the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary.

ABSTRACT: The Chicxulub bolide impact has been linked to a mass extinction of plants at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (KPB; ∼66 Ma), but how this extinction affected plant ecological strategies remains understudied. Previous work in the Williston Basin, North Dakota, indicates that plants pursuing strategies with a slow return-on-investment of nutrients abruptly vanished after the KPB, consistent with a hypothesis of selection against evergreen species during the globally cold and dark impact winter that followed the bolide impact. To test whether this was a widespread pattern we studied 1,303 fossil leaves from KPB-spanning sediments in the Denver Basin, Colorado. We used the relationship between petiole width and leaf mass to estimate leaf dry mass per area (LMA), a leaf functional trait negat

SUBMITTER: Butrim MJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9244629 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature