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Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

We join the excusive club of mass extinction causing species: cyanobacteria, methanogenic microbes, flowers, moss, and trees. And now humans.

Meetups are on Saturdays, flowers bring the honey, trees bring the table.

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I've heard of the others, but... Flowers? Trees? Moss?

Maybe by flowers you meant landplants in general? And shouldn't moss be grouped into this event?

Moss may have caused the late Ordovician mass extinction, trees, and flowering plants both likely caused huge ecological changes when they evolved and spread, but I don’t know if they caused the mass extinctions that are roughly correlated to their rise.

As trees first appeared there was no organism that would have the adaptation to eat wood, so dead trees just piled and piled on for millions of years forming what we now dig out as coal. I think that roughly correlates with the Devonian extinction.

Flowers were supposedly one of the many factors wiping out the dinosaurs (aside from asteroid impacts and Deccan Traps), reducing the food supply for herbivores by outcompeting existing flora.

That's amazing, imagine all that wood and it doesn't rot. Wouldn't it quickly become a problem for the trees themselves too, though?

I love this hypothesis but it's mostly been disproven recently. Fungi were able to degrade it almost immediately

I did some reading and it seems the actual potential mass extinction caused by trees was this: Their roots/mycorrhiza dug deep into the earth and brought up large amounts of phosphorus. Occassional mudslides or other events would then cause this soil to slide into the ocean and create an algae bloom which deprived the ocean of oxygen. Very similar to what's happening today with agricultural runoff of fertilizers

Don't forget cats (although they hid the evidence).

"Avian paleontologist on the brink of major discovery found dead from suicide of two claws in the back of the neck, very sad."

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