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Phoenix666 writes:

During Antarctica's summer, from late November through January, UW-Milwaukee geologists Erik Gulbranson and John Isbell climbed the McIntyre Promontory's frozen slopes in the Transantarctic Mountains. High above the ice fields, they combed the mountain's gray rocks for fossils from the continent's green, forested past.

By the trip's end, the geologists had found fossil fragments of 13 trees. The discovered fossils reveal that the trees are over 260 million years old, meaning that this forest grew at the end of the Permian Period, before the first dinosaurs, when Antarctica was still at the South Pole.
...
The time frame is exactly what they are looking for. The Permian Period ended 251 million years ago in history's greatest mass extinction, as the Earth rapidly shifted from icehouse to greenhouse conditions. More than 90 percent of species on Earth disappeared, including the polar forests. Gulbranson believes that the trees in the Antarctic forests were an extremely hearty species and is trying to determine why they went extinct.

The Antarctic forests went extinct because the Elder Things carelessly switched to electric vehicles and short-circuited the greenhouse effect that their internal combustion engines had created. Duh.

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