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Science 25 August 2006:
Vol. 313. no. 5790, pp. 1112 - 1115
DOI: 10.1126/science.1129569
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Reports

Decoupled Plant and Insect Diversity After the End-Cretaceous Extinction

Peter Wilf,1* Conrad C. Labandeira,2,3 Kirk R. Johnson,4 Beth Ellis4

Food web recovery from mass extinction is poorly understood. We analyzed insect-feeding damage on 14,999 angiosperm leaves from 14 latest Cretaceous, Paleocene, and early Eocene sites in the western interior United States. Most Paleocene floras have low richness of plants and of insect damage. However, a low-diversity 64.4-million-year-old flora from southeastern Montana shows extremely high insect damage richness, especially of leaf mining, whereas an anomalously diverse 63.8-million-year-old flora from the Denver Basin shows little damage and virtually no specialized feeding. These findings reveal severely unbalanced food webs 1 to 2 million years after the end-Cretaceous extinction 65.5 million years ago.

1 Department of Geosciences and Institutes of the Environment, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
2 Department of Paleobiology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560, USA.
3 Department of Entomology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
4 Department of Earth Sciences, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver, CO 80205, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: pwilf{at}psu.edu

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)