Fossilized leaves and pollen are revealing the evolutionary past of New World tropical forests. The findings are helping to reshape predictions of what might happen to these ecosystems as the climate changes.
The great extinction 66 million years ago, caused by the impact of a meteorite in the Yucatan Peninsula, was the starting point for the emergence of Neotropical forests as we know them today.In northern Colombia, in a semi-desert region that juts into the Caribbean Sea, its dusty roads traveled by the Wayúu people with their blankets and colorful backpacks, is— one of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world.
,” note ecologist Christopher W. Dick and botanist R. Toby Pennington in a review of the history and geography of Neotropical tree diversity in the 2019. In addition to the meteorite impact, which marked a before and after in this ecosystem, the rise of the Isthmus of Panama, the formation of the Amazon River and, for example, have profoundly influenced the region’s climate, species formation and migration.
One of Jaramillo’s studies, together with paleobotanist Paula Mejía Velásquez, now with Leeward Community College in Hawaii, consisted of reviewing two such cores. Drilled by ExxonMobil in the region of Los Mangos, the samples remained ignored for decades in the National Rock Library of the Colombian Petroleum Institute. The cores, some 600 to 700 meters long,, some 120 million years ago, to the present.
Around 2002, when Jaramillo was working for the Colombian Petroleum Institute, a pair of fossil-loving geology students, Fabiany Herrera and Edwin Cadena — more enthusiastic than well-trained in paleontology — joined the fossil hunt to help unravel the whole story of the Neotropical forests’ past. “That feeling of hopelessness, that in the Tropics nothing is preserved, that we would not find the fossils we needed, began to disappear with the visits to Cerrejón,” says Jaramillo.
Analysis of 6,000 fossil leaves and 50,000 pollen grains collected from 46 sites — including, of course, Cerrejón, as well as coal mines in central Colombia and the Amazon — have revealed a snapshot of forests 66 million years ago.
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