Lichens Thrived When The Dinosaurs Died

When an asteroid crashed into Earth 66 million years ago, it triggered massive extinctions across the planet. The most famous victims were the dinosaurs, but primitive birds, insects and other life forms. The collision caused the ash clouds to block the sun and cool the planet's temperature, devastating the life of the plants. But a new study in Reports is shown, while terrestrial plants fight, some types of liquids, organisms made of fungi and algae that live together, taking advantage of the moment and evolution to new ways to assume the role of plants in the ecosystem.
"Let's think that liquids will be affected negatively, but in the three groups we observe, we seize the opportunity and diversify quickly," says Jen-Pang Huang, the paper's first author, a former postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum now at the Academia Sinica in Taipei. "Some lichens grow sophisticated 3D structures like plant leaves, and these fill the niches of dying plants."
The subjects were interested in studying the effects of mass extinction on liquids after reading the article on how the attack of the asteroids also caused the extinction of many early bird species.
It has been seen a million times, even if you did not notice. "Liquids are everywhere," says Huang. "If you go out for a walk around the city, the irregular points or the steps that you see on the rocks or on the walls or on the trees, those are the most common answers." A pristine forest, you can find orange, yellow and vivid colors of violet color. "They are what they call" symbiotic organisms ": they are formed by two different life forms that share a body and together. It is an association between an honor and an organism that can perform photosynthesis, generating energy from sunlight either a small algae plant or a special type of blue-green bacteria. The fungi, which include mushrooms and fungi, are on their own branch of the tree of life, separated from plants and animals (and are actually more related to us than with plants.) The main role of fungi is to break down the decomposition material.
During the mass extinction 66 million years ago, the plants suffered because the asteroid ashes blocked sunlight and lowered temperatures. But mass extinction becomes good for fungi, and it does not depend on sunlight to feed and only on a lot of dead material, and on data recording. Keeping in mind that, like a plant or a positive place, one wonders if it looks as if we are negatively affected as a plant or positively as a fungus.
"Originally we expected that the liquids would be affected in a negative way, that we have green things that need light," says Huang.
To see how liquids were affected by mass extinction, they developed and were creative: there are not many fossil fluids of that period of time. But while the researchers did not have lichen fossils, they did have many modern liquid DNAs.
By observing the fungi growing in laboratory environments, the changes in the genetic relationships in the DNA of the fungi, the frequency with the letter in the DNA sequence is accidentally changed during the process of copying the DNA. That is called the mutation rate. If you know the mutation rate, if you compare the DNA sequences of two different species, you can usually extrapolate how long ago you had a common ancestor with the same DNA.
The data entered are the sequences of the genes of the families of the vehicles in the software program that compare DNA and the way of discovering the family tree, social networks and social networks. They reinforced this information with the few fossils of the energy they had, from 100 and 400 million years ago. The results pointed to a liquid boom after 66 million years ago, at least for some of the leafier liquid families.
"Some groups do not show change, they did not suffer or benefit from the changes in the environment," says Lumbsch, who in addition to his work in life is the Vice President of Science and Education in the Field. "Some liquids were extinguished and the leafy macroliquines filled those niches, I felt really happy when I saw that all the liquids suffered."
The results underscored the depth of the natural world that was known today was molded by this massive extinction. "If I could go back 40 million years, the most prominent groups in vegetation, birds, fungi, the results more like what they see now than what they would see 70 million years ago," says Lumbsch. "Most of what we see today in nature originated after the dinosaurs."

By: Preeti Narula
Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190628120432.htm