Sep 17, 2014 10:51 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

The meteor generally accepted to have wiped dinosaurs from the face of the Earth also likely had a profound effect on the planet's flowering plants.

Published in the journal PLOS Biology, a new study led by researchers from the University of Arizona (UA) suggests evergreen plants were hit much harder than deciduous ones. The massive storms, wildfires, global earthquakes and volcanism that followed the meteor strike may not have had the same effects on deciduous plants due to certain properties, the researchers hypothesized.

"When you look at forests around the world today, you don't see many forests dominated by evergreen flowering plants," study lead author Dr. Benjamin Blonder, an ecologist at UA, said in a press release. "Instead, they are dominated by deciduous species, plants that lose their leaves at some point during the year.

"When you hold one of those leaves that is so exquisitely preserved in your hand knowing it's 66 million years old, it's a humbling feeling."

The researchers examined 1,000 fossilized plant leaves found at a site in Southern North Dakota for their study. The samples the team collected covered the last 1.4 million years of the Cretaceous Period and the first 800,000 years of the Paleogene.

"If you think about a mass extinction caused by catastrophic event such as a meteorite impacting Earth, you might imagine all species are equally likely to die," Blonder said in the release. "Survival of the fittest doesn't apply - the impact is like a reset button. The alternative hypothesis, however, is that some species had properties that enabled them to survive.

"Our study provides evidence of a dramatic shift from slow-growing plants to fast-growing species," he said. "This tells us that the extinction was not random, and the way in which a plant acquires resources predicts how it can respond to a major disturbance. And potentially this also tells us why we find that modern forests are generally deciduous and not evergreen."

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