impacted plant life on land, in part because global studies of the fossil record have shown that no major plant families went extinct.
This loss of species represents a real extinction, the scientists said. Modern conservation efforts, for example, focus on saving species—like the polar bear—not the larger group that it belongs to—all bears or all mammals. Applying this to plants, the extinction of an entire modern plant family, like Fagaceae, would require killing off all the species of beeches, chestnuts and oaks.
The K-Pg extinction ushered in the rise and true dominance of flowering plants and helped establish the planet's tropical rainforests that hold most of its biodiversity, Wilf said. Those differences likely were influenced by factors like distance from the impact site, the Chicxulub crater off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, and how susceptible local plant life would have been to freezing conditions brought on by the global darkness following the impact.