If old rainforest ecosystems like these could withstand extinction events (ie. Asteroid impact), wouldnt the fauna living there survive too?
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Species don’t stay the same. They evolve and change over time.
That means that although there has been rainforest in Borneo for 130 million years, the plants and animals which make it up have changed over that time.
Some dinosaurs _have_ stayed around, and [evolved into birds](https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/why-are-birds-the-only-surviving-dinosaurs.html#:~:text=Birds%20evolved%20from%20a%20group,about%20150%20million%20years%20old.).
No. Flora is much more resilient than fauna, that’s why plants were on land before the animals followed them. Fauna are very sensitive to changes in environment, and a 10 km asteroid impact is definitely enough to kill any megafauna anywhere on Earth, and it did.
>why aren’t any surviving dinosaur species found there?
There are.
There are a wide variety of therapod dinosaurs extant today. We call them birds.
The trees all died during the KT extinction events.
They might mean that there was a forest before and after this event for 130 million years, but there were definitely some years after the impact where there were no living trees there.
The oldest tree colony is 14,000 years and the oldest tree is about 5000 years. There are no living beings from 130 million years old, just fossils.
Some dinosaurs (birds) survived the extinction events. Though they were already birds (they evolved into bird tens of millions of years before the impact). They survived because they were small and could live on animal and dead matter.
Plants mostly survived as seed or roots. All trees on Earth died. They survived only as seed (which aren’t living trees).
Technically, there are surviving dinosaur species: the birds. In some ways, this is actually a bigger mystery. The question isn’t just “why did the dinosaurs die?” anymore; you also have to ask “but then why didn’t the birds die?”
Lets turn this question around. Imagine there’s a man living in the woods alone. He hunts, he fishes, he gathers berries, he makes clothes out of skins and plat fibers. A real survivor man. Now you go into the forest and shoot him in the head. Why is the forest still there?
Just because the forest is still there doesn’t mean that certain inhabitants have not been killed.
The changing conditions of the time favored smaller animals.
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We do find them. Birds… and being 130 million years old doesn’t mean that you can have a cosy spot where you could live for 130 million years… that is awful lot of time, enough to make mountains
The dinosaurs of old could not possibly live today… not warm enough and not enough oxygen for them
Watch this if you are interested
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ROzjE8iDPU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ROzjE8iDPU)
Thank you for asking this question that I didn’t realize I was curious about until you asked! This is why I ❤️ reddit.
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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