Insect fate at the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary 65m years ago.

[Michael Gochfeld]

At the risk of injecting an evolutionary note into our edifying debates
on nomenclature, the following article came to my attention


Impact of the Terminal Cretaceous Event on Plant Insect Associations. 

by Condrad Labandeira, Kirk Johnson and Peter Wilf

Dept of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian (NMHN)

THE FOLLOWING IS NOT AN ABSTRACT BUT A DESCRIPTION OF THE ABSTRACT BY
NEIL SMITH. 
The extinction of the dinosaurs at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T)
boundary about 65 million years ago has been traced to the
impact of a large object. The fossil record of insect extinction at the
K-T boundary is not as clear, and it has been
assumed that insects were better able to survive the impact because of
their small size, flexible lifestyles, and overall
abundance. Labandeira et al. analyzed 13,000 fossil plant specimens
collected from above and below the K-T boundary at Williston
Basin, North Dakota. For each plant, they cataloged any signs of the
presence of herbivorous insects, such as holes created
by feeding. Across the 51 types of plant-insect associations, most of
the insects that were specialized for feeding on one
kind of plant became extinct at the K-T boundary. These results also
suggest that the plant-insect diversity bottleneck,
which spans the first 10 million years of the Tertiary in the fossil
record of Wyoming, may have been precipitated by the
impact event. -- LR

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 99, 2061 (2002).

 
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