Ar. Sweet, Plants, a yardstick for measuring the environmental consequences of the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary event, GEOSCI CAN, 28(3), 2001, pp. 127-138
Reactions registered by plant communities to the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T)
boundary cometary impact event include extinctions, killing events, shifts
in the relative number and abundances of taxa, and, for some taxa, an appar
ent insensitivity to imposed stresses. All these provide yardsticks to meas
ure the extent of impact-generated environmental perturbations: extinctions
by their magnitude and selectiveness, killing events by their geographic e
xtent, and the survivors by their varying sensitivities to the boundary eve
nt as reflected in trends in their relative abundances and distribution. In
formation has been assembled from localities in western Canada and Montana
that suggests: most plant extinctions involved what were likely zoophilous
(animal-pollinated) angiosperms; understory vegetation may have survived th
e event; there was extensive destruction of the forest canopy on a continen
tal scale; and there was a variable response to the K-T boundary event by w
hat were likely wind-pollinated angiosperms.