News Feature: A sea in the Amazon
Amy McDermott; PNAS March 9, 2021 118 (10) e2102396118
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New evidence, including geophysical modeling, supports the contentious notion that the Caribbean flooded into the western Amazon during the Miocene. Image credit: Tacio Cordeiro Bicudo (University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil), Victor Sacek (University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil), and Lucy Reading-Ikkanda (artist).
Did the Caribbean sweep into the western Amazon millions of years ago, shaping the region’s rich biodiversity?
A tropical shrub called Chrysobalanus icaco pushes up through Brazil’s white sandy beaches. The plant’s leathery oval leaves and tough silver bark give it the distinct appearance of a mangrove species, adapted to a life buffeted by saltwater. Strangely, though, C. icaco also turns up more than a thousand miles inland, in the forests of the western Amazon. “We find fossil mangroves and associated coastal plants in the middle of the Amazon,” says paleoecologist Carina Hoorn, at the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands.
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