Linked canopy, climate, and faunal change in the Cenozoic of Patagonia

Abstract

Fluctuations revealed in fossil forests The reconstruction of past vegetation unlocks the door to understanding ecological changes associated with climatic change. But it is also difficult. Dunn et al. developed a method for assessing changes in vegetation openness based on epidermal cell morphology from conserved plant tissue. Applying this method to fossil assemblages from Patagonia, they show how vegetation structure changed over the Cenozoic era (49 to 11 million years ago). These changes map onto the known climate changes over this period and can also be used to track how the evolution of herbivorous mammals responded to vegetation structure. Science , this issue p. 258