EVOLUTION CONNECTION The history of life has been punctuated by several mass extinctions. For example, the impact of a meteorite may have wiped out most of the dinosaurs and many forms of marine life at the end of the Cretaceous period (see Concept 25.4). Fossils indicate that plants were less severely affected by this mass extinction. What adaptations may have enabled plants to withstand this disaster better than animals?

Video transcript

Hello everyone. Our next question says fossils indicate that plants were less severely affected by mass extinction. Which won the following adaptations has enabled plants to survive mass extinctions. When we think about mass extinctions, we think about events that cause harsh and drastic environmental conditions. So things like you know volcanic large volcanic eruptions um causing a drastic decrease in sunlight for a long time. I think about giant fires or um shifting tectonic plates sort of things like that. So let's look at our choices and think about which of them reflects an adaptation allowing a plant to survive harsh environmental conditions. So a leaves be stem and d vascular tissue are all external parts of the plant. So all of those things would be affected by bad environmental conditions that could cause the destruction of large numbers of plants. So we could eliminate leaves, stem and vascular tissue. Um We have left seeds and seeds are indeed an adaptation. Plants evolved to have seeds and seeds have the property of seed dormancy and that allows the seeds to lie dormant in the soil for many years and then wait to germinate until the conditions are more favorable. And when they germinate they have the capability of becoming the entire structure of the plant and the species continuing. So seeds are an adaptation that definitely allow plants to survive harsh environmental conditions which would make them more likely to survive a mass extinction event. See you in the next video