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The event that wiped out the dinosaurs wasn't all bad. The low-light environment caused by the meteor impact some 66 million years ago favored the spread of fungi that feed on organic matter, which was abundant at the time as plants and animals were dying in droves.

It was the perfect opportunity for the ancestor of a group of ants to start cultivating these microorganisms, according to a study published on October 3 in the journal Science.

The dating was made possible by analyzing the so-called ultraconserved elements (UCEs) of the genomes of 475 fungal species cultivated by ants and collected from different parts of the Americas. UCEs are regions that remain in the genome throughout the evolution of a group, derived from its most ancient ancestors.

"In this case, we were interested in the regions close to these elements. They show the most recent differences between species and allow us to trace a fairly accurate evolutionary line," adds Pepijn Wilhelmus Kooij, a researcher at IB-UNESP.

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