Ancient Mass Extinction – New Findings Rock Long-Held Assumptions

In research presented on Nov. 4 at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America and published in the October issue of the journal Geology, a University of Texas at Dallas geologist and his colleagues describe new findings that challenge the currently accepted model of the “Great Dying” and how it affected land animals. That event occurred at the end of the Permian geologic period.

The new evidence derives from a key volcanic ash deposit that the team discovered in rock layers, or strata, that were reported to chronicle the mass extinction. By dating the volcanic ash-bearing deposit, researchers concluded that two phases of this extinction—one on land, the other in the oceans—occurred at least 1 million years apart, as opposed to roughly at the same time, as the geoscience community has assumed for decades.

Based on previous dating of shelly fossils and ash beds in marine strata, the die-off among marine species has been well-determined and is generally agreed upon by scientists to have occurred about 251.9 million years ago.

However, the timing of the extinction on land has been more challenging to date definitively. This is due, in part, to a dearth of datable volcanic deposits below and above plant and animal fossils in rocks surrounding the boundary where the Permian period ends and the Triassic begins, said Dr. John Geissman, professor and head of the Department of Geosciences and one of the authors of the study.

“There has been some concern in the scientific community about whether the extinction among vertebrates on land was actually coincident with that in the marine realm in terms of their timing,” Geissman said. “Nonetheless, many researchers have just tacitly assumed that the land event occurred roughly concurrently with the marine extinction.”

Geissman is part of an international research team led by Dr. Robert Gastaldo, lead author of the Geology study and the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology at Colby College in Maine. Gastaldo and his colleagues have spent more than a decade conducting intensive study of exposed rocks in the Karoo Basin in southern South Africa. These regions preserve fossils that chronicle what has long been interpreted as the disappearance of key reptile and amphibian species at the end of the Permian period and the reemergence of completely different species in the Triassic period. The rock layers straddle the space in between where scientists infer the global extinction occurred.

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE…