Leaf-mining insects destroyed with the dinosaurs, others quickly appeared
Thursday, July 24, 2014 - 13:00
in Paleontology & Archaeology
After the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period that triggered the dinosaurs' extinction and ushered in the Paleocene, leaf-mining insects in the western United States completely disappeared. Only a million years later, at Mexican Hat, in southeastern Montana, fossil leaves show diverse leaf-mining traces from new insects that were not present during the Cretaceous, according to paleontologists.