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Article: Plant fossils give first real picture of earliest Neotropical rainforests.
- Article from:
- NewsRx Health & Science
- Article date:
- November 15, 2009
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A team of researchers including a University of Florida paleontologist has used a rich cache of plant fossils discovered in Colombia to provide the first reliable evidence of how Neotropical rainforests looked 58 million years ago.
Researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and UF, among others, found that many of the dominant plant families existing in today's Neotropical rainforests - including legumes, palms, avocado and banana - have maintained their ecological dominance despite major changes in South America's climate and geological structure.
The study, which appears this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of ...