![]() ![]() ![]() To learn what happened to life on land, Viglietti, Angielczyk, and their colleagues examined fossils from 588 four-legged fossil animals that lived in what’s now South Africa’s Karoo Basin at the time of the Permian mass extinction. The marine version of the end-Permian extinction took up 100,000 years out of the entire 3,800,000,000 years that life has existed-the equivalent to 14 minutes out of a whole year. And while that seems like a long time to us, that’s very quick in geologic time. As a result, paleontologists have known for a while that 252 million years ago a mass 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. If you want to become a fossil, dying by water, where your body will rapidly get covered by sediment, is a good way to make that happen. Part of why scientists had looked to the marine extinctions for clues as to what happened on land is that there’s a more complete fossil record of life underwater. Zaituna Skosan, Collections Manager at Iziko Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, glues together a broken up fossil during fieldwork in the Karoo Basin. “This paper is the first really focusing on vertebrates and saying, ‘No, something was going on that was unique to the terrestrial realm.’” “The focus for studying terrestrial extinction has basically been, ‘Can we match up the pattern in the terrestrial realm with what’s observed in oceans?’ And the answer is, ‘Not really,’” says Ken Angielczyk, the paper’s senior author and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Field Museum. “People assumed that because the marine extinction happened over a short period of time, life on land should have followed the same pattern, but we found that the marine extinction may actually be a punctuation to a longer, more drawn-out event on land,” says Pia Viglietti, a postdoctoral researcher at Chicago’s Field Museum and the lead author of the PNAS study. In a new study in PNAS, researchers found that while extinctions happened rapidly in the oceans, life on land underwent a longer, more drawn-out period of extinctions. Scientists are still learning about the patterns of which animals went extinct and which ones survived, and why. The vast majority of animal species went extinct, and when the dust settled, the planet entered the early days of the Age of Dinosaurs. Our planet’s worst mass extinction event happened 252 million years ago when massive volcanic eruptions caused catastrophic climate change. An illustration showing Lystrosaurus during the end-Permian mass extinction.
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