Paleosol Review
Introduction
The Carboniferous rainforest collapse (CRC) was a minor extinction event that occurred about 305 million years ago, in the Early Kasimovian, Late Pennsylvanian (Late Carboniferous) age.[1] It altered the vast coal forests that covered the equatorial region of Euro-America. This event may have fragmented forests into isolated refugia or ecological 'islands', which in turn encouraged dwarfism and, soon after, the extinction of many plant and animal species. After the event, carbon-forming tropical forests continued in large areas of the Earth, but their extent and composition changed, and habitat fragmentation and climate change led to the diversification of non-amphibian tetrapods.[1].
Extinction patterns on land
Contenido
En el Carbonífero, las grandes selvas tropicales de Euramérica albergaron altísimos lycopodiophyta, una mezcla heterogénea de vegetación, así como una gran diversidad de vida animal: libélulas gigantes, milpiés, cucarachas, anfibios y los primeros amniotas.
Floors
The emergence of rainforests in the Carboniferous greatly altered landscapes by eroding low-energy, organic-rich anastomosing (braided) river systems with multiple channels and stable alluvial islands. The continued evolution of tree-like plants increased floodplain stability (less erosion and movement) by the density of floodplain forests, the production of woody debris, and an increase in the complexity and diversity of root assemblages.[2].
The collapse occurred through a series of stepwise changes. First, there was a gradual increase in the frequency of opportunistic ferns at the end of the Moscovian. This was followed in the early Kasimovian by a major and abrupt extinction of the dominant lycopsids and a shift to ecosystems dominated by tree ferns. This is confirmed by a recent study showing the presence of meandering and branching rivers, the occurrence of abundant washed-up woody remains, and records of Log jams decrease significantly at the boundary between the Moscovian and Kasimovian.[2] Rainforests fragmented, forming increasingly distant 'islands', and at the end of the Kasimovian, rainforests disappeared from the fossil record.