WASHINGTON (Reuters) — It may be so dry now that forest fires are raging across the state, but Colorado 64 million years ago may have been home to a tropical rainforest, researchers said last Thursday.

They have excavated a site south of Denver that looks very much like a present-day Amazonian rain forest, full of trees and other plants, the team at the Denver Museum of Nature and Sciences said.

The rainforest would have been lush only a million years after a giant asteroid wiped out much of the life on earth and put an end to the dinosaurs –which suggests either that life recovered more quickly than anybody thought or that pockets of territory were somehow sheltered from the effects of the asteroid, the researchers said.

“The main thing that is surprising is that this diversity is so quick after the extinction of the dinosaurs,” said Kirk Johnson, curator of paleontology and chair of the Department of Earth Sciences at the museum. “This site certainly raises more questions than it provides answers.”

Most scientists believe that an asteroid slammed into the earth 65 million years ago near what is now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, creating a huge crater and throwing billions of tons of dust and rock into the air. It would have dimmed the sun’s light for centuries, and most species of plants and animals died.

For the next 10 million years, the fossil record is “very boring”, with just a few species of plants, animals, and insects, Johnson said. “A million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs was a really peaceful time,” he said. The big carnivores were gone and the ancestors of modern mammals were small, scrambling creatures.

Pocket of rainforest

And on the east slope of the Rockies, it seems, a pocket of rainforest grew.

Nowadays, tropical rainforests are found near the equator, and all have high rainfall and a year-round constant temperature. They harbour many different species of plants and animals, and many of the trees have large leaves with smooth edges shaped to help water drip off easily.

The site, in Castle Rock, Colo, about 25 miles south of Denver and in the foothills of the Rockies, is rich in fossils that look like they came from such an environment. It has the remains of large leaves, fronds, and roots and fossil casts of entire tree trunks, Johnson and colleague Beth Ellis report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. It looks just like the leaf litter found at a present-day rainforest in Peru, with large, smooth-edged leaves.

“When you split the rocks sometimes the leaves actually peel out and blow in the wind,” Johnson said. “You can actually see the cell structure of the leaf.”

He said in the rainforest, leaves are often chewed by insects, as are the fossil leaves. “We found one about five minutes ago; we found a place where a great big hole had been bitten out of a leaf,” said Johnson, who took a break from swinging a pickaxe to explain his work.

The site, just off an interstate highway, contains “tons of new species”, he said. “The site itself produced about 104 different kinds of things and about 80 undescribed extinct species,” he said.

Now Colorado is semi-arid, but 60 million years ago the remnants of a huge inland sea that spread from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico remained. It could have provided moisture that would have swept around and been dumped on the east slope of the mountain range.

Colorado’s mountains are a rich source of dinosaur fossils, but Johnson said most of them seemed to have lived in the warm but dry conditions that prevailed 100 million years ago.