If old rainforest ecosystems like these could withstand extinction events (ie. Asteroid impact), wouldnt the fauna living there survive too?
In: 575
Same reason my house is 200 years old but my grandfather is dead
Just because the environment is old doesn’t mean the organisms inside it won’t change
They moved away due to the Comcast and AT&T duopoly for internet service, with the forest market being the breaking point.
Simplest answer, you can wipe out all or most of a forest, only to have it spring up from seed and grow back fully within a few centuries, if you wipe out most or all of the fauna, it’s gone.
Imagine some of the fauna is still there, not everything has to be a dinosaur, so small reptiles and insects.
Also there’s the birds, flying descendent of some line of dinosaurs.
People are saying birds are dinosaurs, which is true, but what I think you are asking, OP, is is why there aren’t the same dinosaurs even though the forests are there.
The birds that we know today probably didn’t evolve in Borneo, so answers like “Dinosaurs evolved into birds” are wrong because that didn’t happen in Borneo (most likely), it happened elsewhere and birds (dinosaurs) later moved back in.
As to why the original inhabitants aren’t there, it’s likely that the KT event at the end of the cretaceous was so devastating that very few species could survive anywhere on earth. Plants can leave seeds in the ground and regrow later, and burrowing/small animals could hide out and eat seeds and such to survive. Larger species could not survive the devastation because they need more food, most of which was gone.
Some dinosaurs (birds), some mammals, and some reptiles and others survived the extinction, but most of the mammals and dinosaurs (not just dinosaurs!) alive at the time died. What we have now are the descendants of those few survivors, who managed to recolonize the world.
There are! Birds are dinosaurs, actually! Its just that they evolved with the rest of the forest!
If we could go to that era… Would we survive?
They didn’t withstand the extinction event, they got obliterated along with everything else. They just regrew again at some point afterwards.
Your bloodline stretches back over 130 million years. Are you a surviving dinosaur species?
Adding to everyone’s comments here, given the nature of a rainforest, it is possible dinosaur bones have not yet been discovered. The fact that the rainforst re-generated is the nature of a rainforetst. For example, some Australia trees rely on a natural disaster such as bushfire to regenerate. When a dinosaur is gone, there is no regeneration possible.
Imagine an apartment complex over many decades. Sure, the site itself stays but the tenants comes and goes throughout the years.
That’s basically how it works, the place itself stays but the flora and fauna that lives there swaps out.
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