This is a complete and utter disaster. When we last left off at the Permian period, we had a fabulous rainbow Dimetrodon proudly extolling the virtues of prehistoric toothpaste on one's two measures of teeth and being the undisputed queen of the era. If you'll remember, I didn't have the heart to mention in Dimetrodon's post what was bound to happen to him and everyone else.
We've now left the Paleozoic era and are beginning a new age. We cheerfully refer to the Mesozoic era as the Age of the Dinosaurs, but it got off to a rocky start. Or you could say it started with a bang. Or with a bang and with catastrophic global warming, flood basalt events, impact events, methane hydrate gasifaction, major anoxic events and the whole world smelling like rotten eggs until all the plants and animals couldn't take it anymore and dropped dead. The ones hit by the impact event were the lucky ones.
The beginning of the Triassic period of the Mesozoic era was hell on earth. Everyone died. Remember the pretty
Eurypterid from the Ordovician period?
DEAD. How about her pretty sister
Megan, the giant dragonfly from the Carboniferous period? Yeah, she's
DEAD, too.
Dinichthys, the the placoderm terror fish with the enormous jaws? You'd better believe it-
SO DEAD. But not
tiktaalik, right? The recipient of the Paleozoic Medal of Honor for being a pioneer for tetrapods and taking some of the world's first painful breaths of oxygen and laboriously crawling onto the muddy banks on its fin-like proto-arms? Not tiktaalik! But oh yes, tiktaalik too, is DEAD. So is Dimetrodon. So is everybody. Even the trilobites, who had been plugging along since the Cambrian period, finally died off for good at the onset of the Triassic period. They had been on the earth for 291 million years before the Triassic period hit the earth and they all became
DEAD, too.
The Permian-Triassic extinction event was the worst thing that's ever happened to this planet. Even worse than the impact humans have caused with their human-like conquests, much worse than the giant asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, even worse than Woodstock '99.
The Great Dying killed off 90% of all species on earth, with 70% of all terrestrial vertebrates dying off and 96% of all marine being wiped out. All
DEAD. By contrast, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs during the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event killed off only 60% of life on earth. The Great Dying was especially unique because this was the only known mass extinction of insects. Really, you always think those guys can live through anything, but the end of the Permian proved to be too much even for them.
There's some speculation on what exactly caused such an apocalypse, but it was probably a combination of factors and some chain reactions. First, there could have been one or more impact events- you know, asteroids from outer space striking the earth. There are several impact craters that have been proposed as possible causes of the Permian-Triassic extinction event, although some people think that if such an asteroid struck the water 251 million years ago, there wouldn't be any evidence of it today because the earth's crust on the ocean floor keeps changing due to shifting tectonic plates and so none of the ocean floor is really older than 200 million years.
Erupting volcanoes could have played a part, too- in addition to giant volcanic clouds blocking out the sun and trapping in greenhouses gases, the rising temperature could have caused a melting of methane hydrate on the ocean floor. Methane hydrate, or methane ice, is like frozen methane trapped in water ice crystals. A vast release of methane would cause even worse global warming, as Wikipedia tells me that "a methane burp could have released 10,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent - twice as much as in all the fossil fuels on Earth."
And as the earth was eructating, she may have also simultaneously been experiencing her worse case of plant-blackening flatulence. They call it "hydrogen sulfide emissions", but I call it farting. A severe anoxic event at the end of the Permian may have caused the anaerobic bacteria in the ocean- the ones that metabolize sulfate by reducing it to sulfide- to flourish and dominate the world. This is the same bacteria that are responsible for human farts smelling offensive, and for my dog Buddy's farts clearing the room and requiring Jon and me to de-jinx the room with Oro y Plata Fortune Aerosol spray before we can re-enter. Now imagine that the entire earth smelled like a big black dog with a gas problem because of thermal vents erupting with ocean-floor hydrogen sulfide in huge volumes all over the planet.
What a shitty time to be alive, huh? No wonder everyone died.
Still...did
everyone actually die? Who made it through this alive? If not even a significant number of insect species were able to survive this period, who in this unholy hell could have pulled through? Who was among that supernatural 10% of all life forms that was impervious to God's worst hissyfit of all time?
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