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Asteroid that annihilated the dinosaurs helped create Amazon rainforest, study finds
dinosaurs helped to create the world's rainforests, a new study claims.The impact of the 12km-wide space rock striking Earth 66million years ago is understood to have drastically changed the plant life in South America's tropical rainforests.More than 56,000 pollen and leaf fossils from Columbia were studied, which revealed a huge shift in the types of vegetation were around before the asteroid hit.Publishing the findings in the journal Science, co-author Dr Mónica Carvalho, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution in Panama, wrote: "Our team examined over 50,000 fossil pollen records and more than 6,000 leaf fossils from before and after the impact."She added: "The lesson learned here is that under rapid disturbances...