Carboniferous rainforest collapse

Coal forests continued after the Carboniferous rainforest collapse. These plant fossils are from one of those forests from about 5 million years after the CRC. However, the composition of the forests changed from a lepidodendron-dominated forest to one of predominantly tree ferns and seed ferns.

The Carboniferous rainforest collapse (CRC) was a minor extinction event that occurred around 305 million years ago in the Carboniferous period.[1] The event occurred at the end of the Moscovian and continued into the early Kasimovian stages of the Pennsylvanian (Upper Carboniferous).

It altered the vast coal forests that covered the equatorial region of Euramerica (Europe and North America). This event may have fragmented the forests into isolated refugia or ecological "islands", which in turn encouraged dwarfism and, shortly after, extinction of many plant and animal species. Following the event, coal-forming tropical forests continued in large areas of the Earth, but their extent and composition were changed.

  1. ^ Sahney, S., Benton, M.J. & Falcon-Lang, H.J. (2010). "Rainforest collapse triggered Pennsylvanian tetrapod diversification in Euramerica" (PDF). Geology. 38 (12): 1079–1082. Bibcode:2010Geo....38.1079S. doi:10.1130/G31182.1.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)