TY - JOUR
T1 - Decoupled plant and insect diversity after the end-cretaceous extinction
AU - Wilf, Peter Daniel
AU - Labandaira, Conrad C.
AU - Johnson, Kirk R.
AU - Ellis, Beth
PY - 2006/8/25
Y1 - 2006/8/25
N2 - Food web recovery from mass extinction is poorly understood. We analyzed insect-feeding damage on 14,999 angiosperm leaves from 14 latest Cretaceous, Paleocene, and early Eocene sites in the western interior United States. Most Paleocene floras have low richness of plants and of insect damage. However, a low-diversity 64.4-million-year-old flora from southeastern Montana shows extremely high insect damage richness, especially of leaf mining, whereas an anomalously diverse 63.8-million-year-old flora from the Denver Basin shows little damage and virtually no specialized feeding. These findings reveal severely unbalanced food webs 1 to 2 million years after the end-Cretaceous extinction 65.5 million years ago.
AB - Food web recovery from mass extinction is poorly understood. We analyzed insect-feeding damage on 14,999 angiosperm leaves from 14 latest Cretaceous, Paleocene, and early Eocene sites in the western interior United States. Most Paleocene floras have low richness of plants and of insect damage. However, a low-diversity 64.4-million-year-old flora from southeastern Montana shows extremely high insect damage richness, especially of leaf mining, whereas an anomalously diverse 63.8-million-year-old flora from the Denver Basin shows little damage and virtually no specialized feeding. These findings reveal severely unbalanced food webs 1 to 2 million years after the end-Cretaceous extinction 65.5 million years ago.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=33748029512&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=33748029512&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1126/science.1129569
DO - 10.1126/science.1129569
M3 - Article
C2 - 16931760
AN - SCOPUS:33748029512
SN - 0036-8075
VL - 313
SP - 1112
EP - 1115
JO - Science
JF - Science
IS - 5790
ER -