Eli5: If the rainforest of Borneo is 130 million years old, why aren’t any surviving dinosaur species found there?

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If old rainforest ecosystems like these could withstand extinction events (ie. Asteroid impact), wouldnt the fauna living there survive too?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I don’t know if the Borneo rainforest is 130 million years old, but for the sake of argument let’s assume it is.

That statement shouldn’t be taken as implying that the rainforest has somehow been frozen in time, unchanging, for 130 million years. It merely expresses (somewhat ambiguously) that that region has continuously *consisted of rainforest* across that entire span of time.

130 million years ago, it was a rainforest that had dinosaurs in it. It also had a lot of other stuff in it that isn’t there now, and lacked a lot of stuff that is there now. Over time, the dinosaurs and many other species went extinct, but they were also continuously replaced by new species. (Not from new species spontaneously popping out of nowhere, but rather through speciation events, that is, where one species divides into separate populations which eventually evolve into distinct species.) The process was stable enough that at any given moment there was rainforest on that land, even though over time it wasn’t the exact same organisms making up the rainforest, and over longer spans of time, not the exact same species either.

(I might also point out that birds are descended from dinosaurs.)

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