Over the past 500 million years, five large-scale extinctions have taken place, with current predictions indicating that humans are rapidly driving towards a sixth.
The Permian-Triassic mass extinction was the largest of these events, and is believed to have wiped out up to 96% of all marine species.
A new study published in Current Biology examined marine fossils of different species that were discovered in nine sites across South China dating from before, during and after the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.
Scientists sorted these species into groups based on predator-prey relationships to recreate how these ancient communities would have interacted.
They found that over half of the species went extinct with relatively little change to the overall ecosystem function. However, once the last species in each functional group began to disappear, this tipping point led to the rapid collapse of the ecosystem.
…
‘There are two lessons we can learn from the fossil record of these big extinction events,’ says [paleontologist Richard Twitchett]. ‘Firstly, we can see how bad it will get if we do nothing about climate change, and if we let carbon dioxide levels continue to rise to mass extinction causing levels.’
‘But second, we can see that life on Earth is far more resilient than is widely appreciated.’
