Jan 22, 2026 01:35 AM
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1113542
INTRO: The asteroid that struck the Earth 66 million years ago devastated life across the planet, wiping out the dinosaurs and other organisms in a hail of fire and catastrophic climate change. But new research shows that it also set the stage for life to rebound astonishingly quickly.
New species of plankton appeared fewer than 2,000 years after the world-altering event, according to research led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and published in Geology.
Lead author Chris Lowery, a research associate professor at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson School of Geosciences, said that it’s a remarkably quick evolutionary feat that has never been seen before in the fossil record. Typically, new species appear on roughly million-year time frames.
“It’s ridiculously fast,” said Lowery. “This research helps us understand just how quickly new species can evolve after extreme events and also how quickly the environment began to recover after the Chicxulub impact.”
Although previous studies that Lowery and his team have conducted on the Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico have shown that surviving life returned quickly after the catastrophic event, it has been widely accepted that it took tens of thousands of years for the first new species to appear after impact... (MORE - details, no ads)
INTRO: The asteroid that struck the Earth 66 million years ago devastated life across the planet, wiping out the dinosaurs and other organisms in a hail of fire and catastrophic climate change. But new research shows that it also set the stage for life to rebound astonishingly quickly.
New species of plankton appeared fewer than 2,000 years after the world-altering event, according to research led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and published in Geology.
Lead author Chris Lowery, a research associate professor at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson School of Geosciences, said that it’s a remarkably quick evolutionary feat that has never been seen before in the fossil record. Typically, new species appear on roughly million-year time frames.
“It’s ridiculously fast,” said Lowery. “This research helps us understand just how quickly new species can evolve after extreme events and also how quickly the environment began to recover after the Chicxulub impact.”
Although previous studies that Lowery and his team have conducted on the Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico have shown that surviving life returned quickly after the catastrophic event, it has been widely accepted that it took tens of thousands of years for the first new species to appear after impact... (MORE - details, no ads)