The titanic eruptions that formed the Siberian traps are thought to be the origin of the Permian-Triassic crisis. Adobe Stock.
DECRYPTION – An exceptional fossil deposit shows that the rebound that followed the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, 250 million years ago, would have been much faster than expected.
Borrowing a term that has become essential in personal development manuals, we could say that life is particularly “resilient”. None of the five major crises that have profoundly affected life over the past 500 million years have prevented it from finding a new path to reinvent itself. If this is a well-established fact, scientists had perhaps still underestimated the speed with which the living could be reborn from its ashes.
The discovery in China of an “exceptionally preserved deposit” (also called Lagerstätte) thus shows today that only one million years after the massive Permian-Triassic extinction, which saw the disappearance of nearly 90% of the marine species 252 million years ago, new complex and richly diversified ecosystems had already succeeded in establishing themselves. If the first description of this “Guiyang biota” has the honors of the journal Science this week is that his wealth…
This article is for subscribers only. You have 86% left to discover.
Want to read more?
Unlock all items immediately. Without engagement.
Already subscribed? Login