Sixty six million years ago, a global catastrophe extinguished the non-avian dinosaurs. This is common knowledge. It’s also too narrow a view. Various forms of life disappeared in the same geologic instant – from coil-shelled ammonites to some forms of mammal – and others, for reasons as yet unknown, survived.

Plants are among the neglected of the victims and survivors. A magnolia tree does not hold the same cultural cachet as Tyrannosaurus. The post-impact “fern spike” is often cited as a symbol of wide-ranging devastation, but, outside technical journals, that’s about the extent of our attention span for paleoflora. That’s a shame. If we’re going to understand how life