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Palm trees older than we thought - Protecting rainforests with Cool Earth Action - Keeping carbon where it belongs

According to biologists from the French Institute for Research for Development (IRD), forests began to form more than 100 million years ago, shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs. The previous most accepted theory was that this process began much more recently, just 35 to 45 millions years ago, at the time when many mountains, including the Andes, were formed. IRD's work resulted in the first complete genus-level evolutionary history of one of the most characteristic plant families found in tropical rain forests (TRFs) today - the palms (Arecaceae or Palmae). There are 2 500 palm species of which 90 % are restricted to the TRFs.