The Permian Mass Extinction
Introduction
There are five major extinctions in history: the Late Devonian, the Ordovician-Silurian, the Permian-Triassic, the Triassic-Jurassic, and the Cretaceous-Tertiary. Known as the Big Five, these extinctions exceeded all others in size and destruction, each killing more than 60% of species from that period. Each one acted as a bottleneck, allowing the survival of only a fraction of the organisms that had been thriving before, from which evolution and life must continue.
There was one mass extinction above all that came perilously close to turning the Earth into a lifeless and desolate wasteland. The Permian-Triassic Extinction, or Late Permian Extinction is often referred to as “The Great Dying”, due to …show more content…
The dominant land animals of the Early Permian included amphibians and sauropods such as pelycosaurs, a grouping of four-legged reptiles with sails, archosaurs (crocodilians), and diadectes, a genus of reptile-like amphibians. They were cold-blooded, meaning that their body heat was regulated by external heat sources, which proved a problem in the rapidly shifting weather and temperature patterns of the Permian. They were replaced as the dominant land animals by warm-blooded (a trait that put them at a disadvantage during the Permian Extinction, as they needed to eat more to maintain their body heat) synapsids, more specifically therapsids, in the Middle and Late Permian. Aquatic animals included early fish, bacteria, archaea, and invertebrates, such as trilobites, foraminifera, and ammonites (primitive nautiluses). Insects consisted mostly of primitive cockroaches, beetles, and early dragonflies, while vegetation included ferns and conifer trees, which replaced the lycopods of the Carboniferous period in the Middle
Introduction
There are five major extinctions in history: the Late Devonian, the Ordovician-Silurian, the Permian-Triassic, the Triassic-Jurassic, and the Cretaceous-Tertiary. Known as the Big Five, these extinctions exceeded all others in size and destruction, each killing more than 60% of species from that period. Each one acted as a bottleneck, allowing the survival of only a fraction of the organisms that had been thriving before, from which evolution and life must continue.
There was one mass extinction above all that came perilously close to turning the Earth into a lifeless and desolate wasteland. The Permian-Triassic Extinction, or Late Permian Extinction is often referred to as “The Great Dying”, due to …show more content…
The dominant land animals of the Early Permian included amphibians and sauropods such as pelycosaurs, a grouping of four-legged reptiles with sails, archosaurs (crocodilians), and diadectes, a genus of reptile-like amphibians. They were cold-blooded, meaning that their body heat was regulated by external heat sources, which proved a problem in the rapidly shifting weather and temperature patterns of the Permian. They were replaced as the dominant land animals by warm-blooded (a trait that put them at a disadvantage during the Permian Extinction, as they needed to eat more to maintain their body heat) synapsids, more specifically therapsids, in the Middle and Late Permian. Aquatic animals included early fish, bacteria, archaea, and invertebrates, such as trilobites, foraminifera, and ammonites (primitive nautiluses). Insects consisted mostly of primitive cockroaches, beetles, and early dragonflies, while vegetation included ferns and conifer trees, which replaced the lycopods of the Carboniferous period in the Middle