#BESTOF2021: 1/2 The Birth of the Amazon Forest. Carlos Jaramillo, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. @ScienceMagazine (Originally posted July 12,, 2021)
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#BESTOF2021: 1/2 The Birth of the Amazon Forest. Carlos Jaramillo, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. @ScienceMagazine (Originally posted July 12,, 2021)
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute: Panamá
The Birth of the Amazon Forest.
Extinction at the end-Cretaceous and the origin of modern, neotropical rainforests
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/63
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS. I am the world. I'm John Bachelor, and it's a pleasure to welcome |
| 0:09.7 | Carlos Hormillo, Professor Carlos Hormillo, who's publishing with his colleagues in Nature |
| 0:18.0 | Magazine a new revelation about the transformation of the tropical forest over the last 66 million |
| 0:27.6 | years ago. That transformation explains why the richness of the tropical jungle today, the mixed |
| 0:34.8 | richness, and where it came from. The clue is the dinosaurs. Professor, a very good day to you. |
| 0:41.5 | You're in Salamonca, Spain, and we're speaking of the triple canopy jungle of Colombia and Amazon, |
| 0:49.3 | and the Panama area, your home is in Panama. So this is both the 21st century and then 66 million years ago, |
| 0:58.1 | when the asteroid comets struck that part of the world. What did the forest, what did the tropical forest |
| 1:05.2 | look like right before the asteroid struck changed everything? Good day to you. Good morning. So let's go back to the |
| 1:14.7 | morning of a day, 66 million years ago, and imagine you are walking in the tropical South America. |
| 1:22.0 | Then you will see a very open forest. So you will see big trees, but the trees, the canopy of the |
| 1:28.8 | trees will not be close to each other. So you will see a lot of light coming to the top of the forest. |
| 1:36.8 | And then you will see that many of those big trees are not flowering plants, but dinosaurs |
| 1:43.0 | are outcarrier especially. That is a big conifer tree that is common in the southern part of South America |
| 1:49.9 | today. But back in 66 million years ago was very common in the tropics. You also will see a lot of |
| 1:56.0 | firms in the understory and also many flowering plants, but not big trees. And also you will see a |
| 2:03.8 | lot of big animals, dinosaurs walking among the forest, trampling the trees, opening a lot of |
| 2:11.7 | gaps, eating a very different forest from the one we have today. You also will see that many of |
| 2:20.0 | the leaves will have a lot of insect damage. There were many different varieties of insects feeding |
| 2:27.1 | on the leaves of these tropical forests that was not as the forest we know it today. |
| 2:33.5 | The dinosaurs, they were vegetarians. They were eating the forest. Is that correct? Did that make a |
| 2:40.5 | difference to shape the forest? How much the dinosaurs ate and how many there were? |
... |
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