The first maps of the Earth's forests plotted by scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London after creating a database of more than two thousand fossilised forest sites from the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs were at their peak. The patterns of vegetation, together with information about the rate of tree growth, support the idea that the Earth was stifling hot 100 million years ago. High temperatures and possibly more atmospheric carbon dioxide caused forests to extend much closer to the poles and grow almost twice as fast as they do today. The findings have obvious implications for understanding the long-term effects of global warming.
"Some fossil trees from Antarctica had rings more than two millimetres wide on average. Such a rate of growth is usually only seen in trees growing in temperate climates. It tells us that, during the age of the dinosaurs, polar regions had a climate similar to Britain today," explains co-author Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang."Our research shows that weird monkey puzzle forests covered most of the planet, especially in the steamy tropics. At mid-latitudes there were dry cypress woodlands, and near the North Pole it was mostly pines," said Emiliano Peralta-Medina, who led the study.
Just before the dinosaurs went extinct the forests changed as angiosperms – flowering plants – made an appearance. "Flowering trees similar to present-day magnolias took off, bringing color and scent to the world for the first time," says Peralta-Medina. The angiosperms gradually spread over habitats previously dominated by the conifers; by the end of the Cretaceous they are the most common tree species. As well as mapping the fossil forests, the team gathered measurements of tree rings from samples of fossil trees and from earlier studies, and found that Cretaceous trees grew twice as fast as their modern counterparts, particularly nearer to the poles.
