logo
welcome
Live Science

Live Science

'Rising temperatures melted corpses out of the Antarctic permafrost': The rise of one of Earth's most iconic trees in an uncertain world

Live Science
Summary
Nutrition label

74% Informative

The world was about to enter a heatwave, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) Over the course of 8,000 to 10,000 years , atmospheric temperatures would spike.

Mammals, lizards, turtles migrated widely across the continents in response to the changing climates.

Insect herbivores, particularly leaf miners and surface feeders, increased in abundance and became more specialized.

By 52 million years ago , the world hit the highest temperatures since the demise of the dinosaurs.

The climate was perched at the top of a long slide down to the Anthropocene , where we find ourselves today .

Oaks were pioneers in what would become the largely temperate Northern Hemisphere .

We ended up with oaks by the steady work of natural selection acting on variable tree populations.