Researchers exploring Canada's Saskatchewan province have discovered first-of-its-kind evidence of a prehistoric forest fire, showing the ecosystems of the dinosaurs were similar to ecosystems today.

The fossils, deposited approximately 66 million years ago and uncovered by teams from McGill University in Montreal and the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina, demonstrate how forested areas evolved before the mass extinction of the dinosaurs -- and reveal the region's climate was a lot warmer and wetter than today

"Excavating plant fossils preserved in rocks deposited during the last days of the dinosaurs, we found some preserved with abundant fossilized charcoal and others without it. From this, we were able to reconstruct what the Cretaceous forests looked like with and without fire disturbance," Hans Larsson, the Canada research chair in macro-evolution at McGill, said in a news release.

The discovered fire area was dominated by plant life akin to the varieties that lead an area's recovery process after a forest fire today; plants such as alder, birch and sassafras developed during the early growth stages, of the site's recovery while sequoia and ginkgo were seen in more established, mature locations.

"We were looking at the direct result of a 66-million-year old forest fire, preserved in stone," said the study's primary author, Emily Bamforth of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum.

She added the new discovery suggests the mean annual temperature in southern Saskatchewan was 10 to 12 degrees Celsius warmer than contemporary conditions, while the region saw almost six times as much precipitation.

"The abundant plant fossils also allowed us for the first time to estimate climate conditions for the closing period of the dinosaurs in southwestern Canada and provides one more clue to reveal what the ecology was like just before they went extinct," said Larsson.

Researchers will never be able to "fully understand the extinction dynamics," summed up Larsson, "until we understand what normal ecological processes were going on in the background."