ftr I am forever going to be bitter that the post I wanted to be “let’s talk about extinct ecosystems and how cool they are!” got derailed into yet another post just talking about a single taxon like the millions of other posts on palaeoblr
Please tell me more about these extinct ecosystems. Why did they go extinct? Could an ecosystem like that return?
When I say “extinct ecosystem”, I mean those ecosystems that have existed in the past, with extinct animals and plants etc. inhabiting them
by their very definition, they are gone forever
there are ones that were truly unique, like Polar Tropical Forests and Fern Prairies, that we just could not have today
but there were ones that have equivalents to today, as well, like the first savannahs and steppes of the Miocene - they just have earlier versions of the plants and animals
there were so many because there are so many today, and each one had its own flora and fauna and was glorious
There’s the wetlands and forests of Hell Creek in the Latest Cretaceous
the bizarre Volcanic Lake Forests of the Jehol Biota
whatever the hell the Ediacaran Reefs were
the Scale Tree Swamp Forests of the Carboniferous
“Mesozoic 2” aka pre-human Aotearoa
the Western Interior Seaway dominated by Mosasaurs
and so many other things, I couldn’t possibly list them all. Every time period had its own biosphere and biomes, and they were all unique.
#i wanna see the Aurora Borealis over a tropical forest#BC Canada has a Boreal Rainforest so you can definitely get that
that isn’t what I mean by “Polar Tropical Forest”
I mean a tropical forest
at the poles
ie, the ecosystems present during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
we have fossils of plants that showcase how different tropical plant lifestyles had to be up at the poles because of the light weirdness
the important part is “tropical”, not “wet/rainforest”. those are two different things
Temperate and Boreal Rainforests are wonderful and some of my favorite living biomes, but they aren’t what I was talking about
May I ask about the fern prairies? That sounds really cool!
Grass is a relatively recent thing
it first evolved in the latest Cretaceous, but it didn’t actually take over everywhere until the Miocene, when grasses that process light differently (look up C3 vs C4 photosynthesis) evolved and just took the fuck over the planet
before then, other plants formed the low ground cover over the earth, and in many places those plants were ferns - spread all over the ground and covering it, much like grass, but significantly less dense. Dirt would have been much more common everywhere.
This is why I am begging every single game developer to remember that grass is not a neutral ground cover
My favorite extinct ecosystem, if it counts while being as physically tiny as it was, is the floating logs that existed in the ocean between the first appearance of woody trees and the first appearance of organisms that could break down wood - floating reefs of a sort, trailing enormous filter-feeding crinoids below them. The baleen whales of their time
yeah that counts! And how bizarre those must have been!!!