The plant-eating pareiasaurs were preyed on by sabre-toothed gorgonopsians. Both groups died out during the end-Permian mass extinction, or "The Great Dying." Credit: © Xiaochong Guo
Phys.org has a story about the Permian Mass Extinction. A new study by an international team of scientists from multiple universities in China, Britain, and the United States looked at why communities took so long to recover after the "Great Dying", which took place 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian Period. The reason was due to the sheer scale of the devastation, with 19 of 20 species going extinct during the event. Find all the details in a paper which was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Over the course of Earth's history, several mass extinction events have destroyed ecosystems, including one that famously wiped out the dinosaurs. But none were as devastating as "The Great Dying," which took place 252 million years ago during the end of the Permian period. A new study, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows in detail how life recovered in comparison to two smaller extinction events. The international study team—composed of researchers from the China University of Geosciences, the California Academy of Sciences, the University of Bristol, Missouri University of Science and Technology, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences—showed for the first time that the end-Permian mass extinction was harsher than other events due to a major collapse in diversity.
To better characterize "The Great Dying," the team sought to understand why communities didn't recover as quickly as other mass extinctions. The main reason was that the end-Permian crisis was much more severe than any other mass extinction, wiping out 19 out of every 20 species. With survival of only 5% of species, ecosystems had been destroyed, and this meant that ecological communities had to reassemble from scratch.
To investigate, lead author and Academy researcher Yuangeng Huang, now at the China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, reconstructed food webs for a series of 14 life assemblages spanning the Permian and Triassic periods. These assemblages, sampled from north China, offered a snapshot of how a single region on Earth responded to the crises. "By studying the fossils and evidence from their teeth, stomach contents, and excrement, I was able to identify who ate whom," says Huang. "It's important to build an accurate food web if we want to understand these ancient ecosystems."
