Our planet’s worst mass extinction took place 252 million years ago when massive volcanic eruptions caused epic climate change. Most animal species went extinct and set the stage for the early days of the age of Dinosaurs.
In a new study, researchers found that the extinction happened rapidly in the oceans; however, life on land underwent a longer, more drawn out period of extinctions.
Due to the extensive fossil record in the oceans, paleontologists have known for a while that 252 million years ago a massive extinction hit at the end of the Permian period and within 100,000 years, more than 85% of the species living in the ocean went extinct.
It’s not clear exactly why the mass extinction event happened much more slowly on land.
One reason for the discrepancy could be that the oceans can absorb chemical changes and stabilize themselves up to a certain level. Then all of a sudden you get sudden ecosystem breakdowns like ocean acidification and coral bleaching. The same could be true for the late Permian oceans.
Understanding what happened in the end-Permian mass extinction will give us clues about the rise of the dinosaurs – many of the ancient mammal relatives went extinct, leaving ecological vacancies that dinosaur ancestors evolved to fill. The end-Permian extinction also provides insights into the mass extinction event that the Earth is currently seeing due to climate change and habitat destruction. The Earth could take hundreds of thousands of years, or even millions to recover.