WILDFIRES BURNED ANTARCTICA 75 MILLION YEARS AGO
Raging wildfires tore through Antarctica 75 million years ago, back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. During the Late Cretaceous Period, one of the warmest periods on Earth which ran from 100 million to 66 million years ago, Antarctica’s James Ross Island was home to a temperate forest of conifers, ferns and flowering plants known as angiosperms, as well as to a slew of dinosaurs. But it wasn’t a total paradise; ancient ‘paleofires’ burned parts of those forests to a crisp, leaving behind charcoal remnants that scientists have now scooped up and studied.
In 2015, researchers documented the first known evidence of dinosaurage wildfires in West Antarctica. For the recent work, an international team of scientists analysed fossils collected during an expedition to James Ross Island. These fossils contained fragments of plants that looked like charcoal residue, which had weathered away over the past tens of millions of years. The charcoal fragments were small – the largest paper-thin pieces were just 19 by 38 millimetres. But scanning electron microscope images revealed their identity. These fossils are likely burned gymnosperms, likely from a botanical family of coniferous trees called Araucariaceae.