Did you make a wind of wind?

DInosaurs was the architects of the entire ecosystems on the ground. The chalk era forests maintained land, ground operation, and soils of pieces of large herbing animals such as tricerotops and Edmontosaurus, which helps to maintain open savanna that could have been thick with trees. This, in turn, had a profound impact on how rivers flowed through the landscape, while dinosaurs were alive and after extinct at the end of the asteroids.

When giant reptiles were alive, rivers tend to flow straight, overcome their banks, and spread across the scene. After its demise, the forests grew, and rivers created winding tracks. This is among new results TicketPublished this week in Nature Communications Earth and environment By a team of scientists from the University of Michigan.

“The disappearance of these huge dinosaurs, which was mainly rearranged and the reshaping of landscapes and ecosystems as we know today,” says Luke Wayer, a fossil scientist at the University of Michigan and the author of the study. “The extinction event, which is biological, can have severe consequences on the non -biological aspects of landscapes.”

After Deno’s demise, thick forests grew, and rivers ran out of winding paths.

The newly proposed relationship between dinosaurs and rivers was as a result of the close audit of the deposit layers that were placed before and after the meteoroppops that killed the dinos the earth 66 million years ago. The most famous mark of this limits between the era of dinosaurs and the era of mammals-known as the borders of the Cretaceous period-is a thin layer of fertilized deposits in Iridium that was delivered by the meteorological and scattered meteorology all over the world. But the layers on both sides of these borders also record a sudden shift in many rock bumps in the ancient floods.

Under the border, the sediments tend to be thick with silt and sand, says Waver. This indicates rivers regularly overflowing with their banks and delivering sediment through the flood. Above the border, there is much lower than silt, sand and a lot of charcoal – casual waste from old plants. This pattern indicates that the banks of the river began to stabilize the sediments into wide and specific windows.

Geologists had already proposed explanations for this transformation, none of them related to dinosaurs. One of the ideas is that early in Paleogene, the Earth was simply more humid in general, due to more precipitation or seas, which raised the water level. Fires that were ignited by the effect of the meteorite can also change the deposits that flow through the rivers. However, Wifer and his colleagues are suspected that these interpretations were missing an important part of the story: dinosaurs. “These things are a very enormous presence on the landscape,” he says.

The disappearance of dinosaurs, which are mainly rearranged as we know today.

To get a better view, the researchers looked at the protrusions across West North America that clearly appear layers before and after the borders of the Cretaceous era, including five newly identified border sites in Montana and Woewang. They found a change in the sediment from sand and sample to coal consistent throughout Western North America and lasts for more than a million years after influence. In their studies, they argue that the shift in this scale is the best explanation by suddenly and foresty re -growth, which has already been collected by hungry dinosaurs.

“With this spicy and wet landscape, there is no reason for the lack of dense forests to be formed, unless you have something that prevents them from coming,” says Wifer. Within a few decades to a few centuries after inciting the destruction by the meteorite, he says that the forests would have been planted to form closed curtains that were not different from moderate rainforests in the northwest of the Pacific Ocean. Then, these forests had rooted the soil in place and the stability of rivers anywhere in which these trees could grow. “This is a first step towards testing a really big idea,” says Wifer.

Scott Wing at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, which did not participate in the research, says other research supports the idea that forests have grown quickly after the disappearance of dinosaurs. For example, an increase in the size of the seeds found in the sediments was found after the boundaries of the religious mammals. These large seeds indicate that plants were adapting to a dense forest environment, because large seeds can live longer without sunlight before they germinate. He says the association with rivers “is a new line of evidence. It is a different way to consider the problem.”

Matthew Labo of Stanford University, which has not participated in the study 450 million years ago, says the new theory brings dinosaurs to the biggest story about how plants form rivers to flow since they appeared on Earth 450 million years ago. “Once the plants evolved, there was a group of things that changed the distribution of vegetation on the ground.”

In new dinosaurs -free forests, small mammals began to rise. In the end, the majority came, as a few of them will come to reshape the planet’s rivers on a larger scale. “It is an important story for all the history of the earth from the first ground plants to this day,” says Labotter.

Pulse Image: Catmando / Shutterstock

• James Denin

  Spread on September 16, 2025

  James Denin is a journalist for the science and environment from Colorado, based in New York. Find more of his work in Jamesdinneen.wordpress.com.