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Ancient plants escaped the end-Permian mass extinction

A global biodiversity crash 251.9 million years ago has revealed how ecosystems respond to extreme perturbation. The finding that terrestrial ecosystems were less affected than marine ones is unexpected.
  1. Robert A. Gastaldo

    1. Robert A. Gastaldo is in the Department of Geology, Colby College, Waterville, Maine 04901, USA.

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Changes in Earth’s biodiversity recorded in fossils over various spatial and timescales reveal the comings and goings of species as they emerge and go extinct, and offer insights into how both species and the ecosystems they inhabit respond to perturbation. These patterns of the past provide models that might help us to understand the changes that life on Earth will experience in the future. The end-Permian mass extinction, often called the mother of mass extinctions1, is a focus of such studies. Large waves of extinctions occurred over a time interval of 60,000 to 120,000 years2 at the end of the Permian period, which lasted from 298.9 million to 251.9 million years ago. Fossil studies indicate that more than 90% of marine invertebrates went extinct3 as a consequence of extreme perturbations of the conditions on Earth, including intense volcanic activity. Writing in Nature Communications, Fielding et al.4 and Nowak et al.5 reveal what happened to terrestrial plants during the end-Permian crisis. Both contributions are well supported by an array of data, and both tell a slightly different story.

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Nature 567, 38-39 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00744-3

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