page_title: Carboniferous rainforest collapse
hierarchical_section_title: Carboniferous rainforest collapse
caption_attribution_description: Exhibit in the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Houston, Texas, USA. Photography was permitted in the museum without restriction.
context_page_description: The Carboniferous rainforest collapse was a minor extinction event that occurred around 305 million years ago in the Carboniferous period. It altered the vast coal forests that covered the equatorial region of Euramerica. This event may have fragmented the forests into isolated 'islands', which in turn caused dwarfism and, shortly after, extinction of many plant and animal species. Following the event, coal-forming tropical forests continued in large areas of the Earth, but their extent and composition were changed.
  The event occurred at the end of the Moscovian and continued into the early Kasimovian stages of the Pennsylvanian.
context_section_description: The Carboniferous rainforest collapse (CRC) was a minor extinction event that occurred around 305 million years ago in the Carboniferous period. It altered the vast coal forests that covered the equatorial region of Euramerica (Europe and America). This event may have fragmented the forests into isolated 'islands', which in turn caused dwarfism and, shortly after, extinction of many plant and animal species. Following the event, coal-forming tropical forests continued in large areas of the Earth, but their extent and composition were changed.
  The event occurred at the end of the Moscovian and continued into the early Kasimovian stages of the Pennsylvanian (Upper Carboniferous).
caption: Coal forests continued after the Carboniferous rainforest collapse. These plant fossils are from one of those forests from about 5 million years after the CRC. However, the composition of the forests changed from a lepidodendron-dominated forest to one of predominantly tree ferns and seed ferns.
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