Sixty-five million years ago, life on Earth was sorely tested. One or more catastrophic events including a massive asteroid strike and increased volcanic activity, created wildfires on a global scale and dust clouds that cut the planet's surface off from the sun's vital light. The majority of animal species went extinct including, most famously, the dinosaurs. The fate of the planet's plants is less familiar, but 60% of those also perished. What separated the survivors from the deceased? How did some species cross this so-called "K/T boundary"?
Jeffrey Fawcett form the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology thinks that the answer lies in their genomes and specifically how many copies they have. Geneticists have found that the majority of plants have duplicated their entire portfolio of genetic material at some point in their evolution. They are called "polyploids" - species with multiple copies of the same genome.
By dating these doublings, Fawcett ...
