Calibrating the end-Permian mass extinction

The end-Permian mass extinction was the most severe biodiversity crisis in Earth history. To better constrain the timing, and ultimately the causes of this event, we collected a suite of geochronologic, isotopic, and biostratigraphic data on several well-preserved sedimentary sections in South China. High-precision U-Pb dating reveals that the extinction peak occurred just before 252.28 ± 0.08 million years ago, after a decline of 2 per mil (‰) in δ(13)C over 90,000 years, and coincided with a δ(13)C excursion of -5‰ that is estimated to have lasted ≤20,000 years. The extinction interval was less than 200,000 years and synchronous in marine and terrestrial realms; associated charcoal-rich and soot-bearing layers indicate widespread wildfires on land. A massive release of thermogenic carbon dioxide and/or methane may have caused the catastrophic extinction.     

A double mass extinction at the end of the paleozoic era

Three tests based on fossil data indicate that high rates of extinction recorded in the penultimate (Guadalupian) stage of the Paleozoic era are not artifacts of a poor fossil record. Instead, they represent an abrupt mass extinction that was one of the largest to occur in the past half billion years. The final mass extinction of the era, which took place about 5 million years after the Guadalupian event, remains the most severe biotic crisis of all time. Taxonomic losses in the Late Permian were partitioned among the two crises and the intervening interval, however, and the terminal Permian crisis eliminated only about 80 percent of marine species, not 95 or 96 percent as earlier estimates have suggested.     

U/Pb zircon geochronology and tempo of the end-permian mass extinction

The mass extinction at the end of the Permian was the most profound in the history of life. Fundamental to understanding its cause is determining the tempo and duration of the extinction. Uranium/lead zircon data from Late Permian and Early Triassic rocks from south China place the Permian-Triassic boundary at 251.4 +/- 0.3 million years ago. Biostratigraphic controls from strata intercalated with ash beds below the boundary indicate that the Changhsingian pulse of the end-Permian extinction, corresponding to the disappearance of about 85 percent of marine species, lasted less than 1 million years. At Meishan, a negative excursion in delta13C at the boundary had a duration of 165,000 years or less, suggesting a catastrophic addition of light carbon.     

Middle mississippian blastoid extinction event

The Middle Mississippian blastoid (Phylum Echinodermata) extinction event (about 340 million years ago) was a rapid, habitat-specific extinction. Blastoids became rare or absent in shallow-water environments after the extinction, and this change was probably synchronous worldwide. Onshore-offshore habitat shifts have been recognized as an important historical trend among marine benthos. Unlike trends exhibited by other groups, blastoids appear to have repopulated shallow-water habitats after a period of diminished diversity and abundance.     

Ascent of dinosaurs linked to an iridium anomaly at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary

Analysis of tetrapod footprints and skeletal material from more than 70 localities in eastern North America shows that large theropod dinosaurs appeared less than 10,000 years after the Triassic-Jurassic boundary and less than 30,000 years after the last Triassic taxa, synchronous with a terrestrial mass extinction. This extraordinary turnover is associated with an iridium anomaly (up to 285 parts per trillion, with an average maximum of 141 parts per trillion) and a fern spore spike, suggesting that a bolide impact was the cause. Eastern North American dinosaurian diversity reached a stable maximum less than 100,000 years after the boundary, marking the establishment of dinosaur-dominated communities that prevailed for the next 135 million years.     

Impact ejecta layer from the mid-Devonian: possible connection to global mass extinctions

We have found evidence for a bolide impacting Earth in the mid-Devonian ( approximately 380 million years ago), including high concentrations of shocked quartz, Ni, Cr, As, V, and Co anomalies; a large negative carbon isotope shift (-9 per mil); and microspherules and microcrysts at Jebel Mech Irdane in the Anti Atlas desert near Rissani, Morocco. This impact is important because it is coincident with a major global extinction event (Kacák/otomari event), suggesting a possible cause-and-effect relation between the impact and the extinction. The result may represent the extinction of as many as 40% of all living marine animal genera.     

The ecology of early man in southern Africa

It is not possible at present to demonstrate hominid occupation of southern Africa prior to the middle or late Pliocene, perhaps 3 million years ago. It may be the case that much, if not most, of the subcontinent was in fact uninhabited before that. The earliest hominid known to have lived in southern Africa is Australopithecus africanus. It was apparently replaced by Homo (?evolved into Homo) by 2 million years ago, at approximately the same time as A. robustus is first recorded locally. Homo and A. robustus then coexisted until perhaps 1 million years ago, after which Homo survived alone. There is no solid evidence that either of the southern African australopithecines made tools or accumulated bones. In fact, at the known sites, it now seems more likely that the bones, including those of the australopithecines themselves, were accumulated by carnivores. The known archeological record of southern Africa begins 2 million to 1.5 million years ago and the oldest stone tools may belong to the Oldowan Industry. Far better documentation exists for the succeeding Acheulean Industrial Complex, which was present in southern Africa almost certainly before 1 million years ago and persisted with modifications probably until sometime between 300,000 and 130,000 years ago. Although it is known that Acheulean peoples made handaxes, cleavers, and other stone tools, very little else is known about the activities of Acheuleans in southern Africa. Far more is known about their Middle and Later Stone Age successors. Southern African MSA peoples were perhaps among the earliest anywhere to take systematic advantage of aquatic resources for their subsistence, although they apparently did so far less effectively than did the LSA peoples who followed them. There are also contrasts between the ways in which MSA and LSA peoples dealt with terrestrial prey and between the contents of MSA and LSA artifact assemblages. The LSA peoples, for example, seem to have made much more extensive use of bone as a raw material, and they were the first to manufacture articles that are clearly interpretable as ornaments or art objects. From an evolutionary perspective, the LSA may represent a quantum advance over the MSA, perhaps correlated with the replacement of an archaic human physical type by the modem one. However, this must remain only a working hypothesis until much more is learned about the earliest LSA, dating to 35,000 to 40,000 years ago or more, and until there are adequate samples of well-provenienced MSA and early LSA physical remains. The later LSA, postdating 20,000 to 18,000 years ago, is reasonably well known. Later LSA peoples were probably at least partly responsible for the extinction of several large mammals in southern Africa about 10,000 years ago. By that date or shortly thereafter, at least some LSA peoples established basic hunting-gathering adaptations, which continued until the introduction and spread of agriculture and pastoralism, beginning roughly 2000 years ago. Thereafter, hunters and gatherers became progressively restricted in numbers and distribution, such that today only a very few exist, restricted to some of the most marginal environments of the subcontinent. It remains a major goal of southern African archeology to shed more light on the evolution and operation of hunting-gathering cultures during the vast time span when they covered all of southern Africa.     

A short duration of the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary event: evidence from extraterrestrial helium-3

Analyses of marine carbonates through the interval 63.9 to 65.4 million years ago indicate a near-constant flux of extraterrestrial helium-3, a tracer of the accretion rate of interplanetary dust to Earth. This observation indicates that the bolide associated with the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction event was not accompanied by enhanced solar system dustiness and so could not have been a member of a comet shower. The use of helium-3 as a constant-flux proxy of sedimentation rate implies deposition of the K-T boundary clay in (10 +/- 2) x 10(3) years, precluding the possibility of a long hiatus at the boundary and requiring extremely rapid faunal turnover.     

Decoupled plant and insect diversity after the end-Cretaceous extinction

Food web recovery from mass extinction is poorly understood. We analyzed insect-feeding damage on 14,999 angiosperm leaves from 14 latest Cretaceous, Paleocene, and early Eocene sites in the western interior United States. Most Paleocene floras have low richness of plants and of insect damage. However, a low-diversity 64.4-million-year-old flora from southeastern Montana shows extremely high insect damage richness, especially of leaf mining, whereas an anomalously diverse 63.8-million-year-old flora from the Denver Basin shows little damage and virtually no specialized feeding. These findings reveal severely unbalanced food webs 1 to 2 million years after the end-Cretaceous extinction 65.5 million years ago.     

Atmospheric carbon injection linked to end-Triassic mass extinction

The end-Triassic mass extinction (~201.4 million years ago), marked by terrestrial ecosystem turnover and up to ~50% loss in marine biodiversity, has been attributed to intensified volcanic activity during the break-up of Pangaea. Here, we present compound-specific carbon-isotope data of long-chain n-alkanes derived from waxes of land plants, showing a ~8.5 per mil negative excursion, coincident with the extinction interval. These data indicate strong carbon-13 depletion of the end-Triassic atmosphere, within only 10,000 to 20,000 years. The magnitude and rate of this carbon-cycle disruption can be explained by the injection of at least ~12 × 10(3) gigatons of isotopically depleted carbon as methane into the atmosphere. Concurrent vegetation changes reflect strong warming and an enhanced hydrological cycle. Hence, end-Triassic events are robustly linked to methane-derived massive carbon release and associated climate change.     

Selectivity of end-Cretaceous marine bivalve extinctions

Analyses of the end-Cretaceous or Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction show no selectivity of marine bivalve genera by life position (burrowing versus exposed), body size, bathymetric position on the continental shelf, or relative breadth of bathymetric range. Deposit-feeders as a group have significantly lower extinction intensities than suspension-feeders, but this pattern is due entirely to low extinction in two groups (Nuculoida and Lucinoidea), which suggests that survivorship was not simply linked to feeding mode. Geographically widespread genera have significantly lower extinction intensities than narrowly distributed genera. These results corroborate earlier work suggesting that some biotic factors that enhance survivorship during times of lesser extinction intensities are ineffectual during mass extinctions.     

Glassy microspherules (microtektites) from an upper devonian limestone

The properties of microspherules recovered from an Upper Devonian marine limestone immediately overlain by a geochemical anomaly of siderophile and chalcophile elements are similar to those of impact-derived microtektites. These microspherules are glass, have splash-form shapes, contain spherical vesicles and lechatelierite inclusions, and show oxide compositional variations similar to those in known microtektites. These characteristics suggest that these Upper Devonian microspherules have an impact origin. A bolide impact may have occurred about 365 million years ago on the South China Plate and caused a faunal extinction on eastern Gondwana.     

Insect diversity in the fossil record

Insects possess a surprisingly extensive fossil record. Compilation of the geochronologic ranges of insect families demonstrates that their diversity exceeds that of preserved vertebrate tetrapods through 91 percent of their evolutionary history. The great diversity of insects was achieved not by high origination rates but rather by low extinction rates comparable to the low rates of slowly evolving marine invertebrate groups. The great radiation of modern insects began 245 million years ago and was not accelerated by the expansion of angiosperms during the Cretaceous period. The basic trophic machinery of insects was in place nearly 100 million years before angiosperms appeared in the fossil record.     

Periodicity of extinctions in the geologic past: deterministic versus stochastic explanations

The temporal spacing and the magnitude of major extinctions over the past 250 and 570 million years, based on the use of different metrics of extinction probability, are analyzed by comparing deterministic and stochastic explanations. The best-fitting time series model is a stochastic autoregressive model that displays a pseudoperiodic behavior with a cycle length of 31 million years for the past 250 million years, regardless of the metric of extinction probability. The periodicity lengthens and weakens when the analysis is extended to the entire Phanerozoic. The history of the probability of extinction for the entire Phanerozoic, based on time series analysis, does not support the reported bipartite distribution of Van Valen. Rather, the probability of extinction has decreased uniformly over Phanerozoic time whereas the inertia or stability of the biotic system after the Late Permian crisis has increased.     

Out of the tropics: evolutionary dynamics of the latitudinal diversity gradient

The evolutionary dynamics underlying the latitudinal gradient in biodiversity have been controversial for over a century. Using a spatially explicit approach that incorporates not only origination and extinction but immigration, a global analysis of genera and subgenera of marine bivalves over the past 11 million years supports an "out of the tropics" model, in which taxa preferentially originate in the tropics and expand toward the poles without losing their tropical presence. The tropics are thus both a cradle and a museum of biodiversity, contrary to the conceptual dichotomy dominant since 1974; a tropical diversity crisis would thus have profound evolutionary effects at all latitudes.     

New early Jurassic tetrapod assemblages constrain Triassic-Jurassic tetrapod extinction event

The discovery of the first definitively correlated earliest Jurassic (200 million years before present) tetrapod assemblage (Fundy basin, Newark Supergroup, Nova Scotia) allows reevaluation of the duration of the Triassic-Jurassic tetrapod extinction event. Present are tritheledont and mammal-like reptiles, prosauropod, theropod, and ornithischian dinosaurs, protosuchian and sphenosuchian crocodylomorphs, sphenodontids, and hybodont, semionotid, and palaeonisciform fishes. All of the families are known from Late Triassic and Jurassic strata from elsewhere; however, pollen and spore, radiometric, and geochemical correlation indicate an early Hettangian age for these assemblages. Because all "typical Triassic" forms are absent from these assemblages, most Triassic-Jurassic tetrapod extinctions occurred before this time and without the introduction of new families. As was previously suggested by studies of marine invertebrates, this pattern is consistent with a global extinction event at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary. The Manicouagan impact structure of Quebec provides dates broadly compatible with the Triassic-Jurassic boundary and, following the impact theory of mass extinctions, may be implicated in the cause.     

Impact event at the Permian-Triassic boundary: evidence from extraterrestrial noble gases in fullerenes

The Permian-Triassic boundary (PTB) event, which occurred about 251.4 million years ago, is marked by the most severe mass extinction in the geologic record. Recent studies of some PTB sites indicate that the extinctions occurred very abruptly, consistent with a catastrophic, possibly extraterrestrial, cause. Fullerenes (C60 to C200) from sediments at the PTB contain trapped helium and argon with isotope ratios similar to the planetary component of carbonaceous chondrites. These data imply that an impact event (asteroidal or cometary) accompanied the extinction, as was the case for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event about 65 million years ago.     

Sulfur isotopic composition of cenozoic seawater sulfate

A continuous seawater sulfate sulfur isotope curve for the Cenozoic with a resolution of approximately 1 million years was generated using marine barite. The sulfur isotopic composition decreased from 19 to 17 per mil between 65 and 55 million years ago, increased abruptly from 17 to 22 per mil between 55 and 45 million years ago, remained nearly constant from 35 to approximately 2 million years ago, and has decreased by 0.8 per mil during the past 2 million years. A comparison between seawater sulfate and marine carbonate carbon isotope records reveals no clear systematic coupling between the sulfur and carbon cycles over one to several millions of years, indicating that changes in the burial rate of pyrite sulfur and organic carbon did not singularly control the atmospheric oxygen content over short time intervals in the Cenozoic. This finding has implications for the modeling of controls on atmospheric oxygen concentration.     

When biotas meet: understanding biotic interchange

When the barrier between biotas with long separate histories breaks down, species invade from one biota to the other. Studies of episodes of marine and terrestrial biotic interchange that have occurred during the last 20 million years show that large-scale extinction of species before the onset of interchange renders biotas especially prone to invasion. As environments and species are being exploited and eliminated on an ever increasing scale in the human-dominated biosphere, the geographical expansion of species from biotas in which evolution of high competitive, defensive, and reproductive abilities has proceeded the furthest will become more frequent. Historical events and interactions are essential ingredients for understanding the current and future structure and composition of the world's biota.     

Evidence for low temperatures and biologic diversity in cretaceous high latitudes of australia

A diverse terrestial biota inhabited polar latitudes during the Cretacous, 105 to 130 Ma (million years ago), along what is now the southeast coast of Australia This biota, from rocks in the Otway and Strzelecki groups, cnsisted of more than 150 taxa of vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants. Oxygen isotope ratios in diagenetic calcite suggest that mean annual temperatures were most likely less than 5 degrees C, and rings present in the fossil araucarian-podocarp-ginko woods indicate saonality. Southeastern Austalia, thus, seems to have had a cool, seasonal, nontropical climate. Dinosaurs that have been recovered are up to five species and three genera of hypsilophodontids, all of which were endemic, and three species of theropods. The occurrence of Allosaurus sp. and labyrinthodont amphibians, which had become extinct elsewhere in the Jurassic, indicate that isolation may have allowed extended surival of these taxa in Australia. In that dinosaurs coped with high latitude for at least 65 million years [Valaginian to Albian time in Australia and Campanian to Maastrictian time (80 to 65 Ma) in Alaska] suggests that cold and darkness may not have been prime factors bringing about the extinction of dinosaurs and some other groups at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, unless they were prolonged.