A 250-million-year-old fossil cache discovered in Western Australia’s Kimberly region reveals that new marine reptiles thrived after Earth’s worst mass extinction. Initial studies in the 1970s suggested only a few species existed afterwards, but this year, scientists have reexamined and identified a diverse range of complex predators that flourished.
“Less than a million years after Earth’s worst mass extinction, crocodile-like amphibians were already moving through coastal waters around the world,” a researcher from Discovery Magazine said.
The Permian-Triassic Extinction wiped out approximately 96% of marine species, taking the ecosystem 5 million to 10 million years to recover. Oceans went from harboring lively coral reefs and various complex organisms to becoming homogenized, bare environments.
“The Permian mass extinction…was the most devastating ecological event of all time,” PMC’s team said.
Until this year, the only notable species thought to have survived the extinction were the Lingulidae brachiopods, a type of clam-like fish, along with some mollusks and ammonoids scattered throughout the empty ocean.
“They thrived in the Early Triassic marine realm, forming a nearly globally distributed… fauna,” an anonymous scientist from Science Daily said.
However, in late February, scientists found crocodile-like marine amphibian fossils, with significantly greater complex structures than the Lingulidae brachiopods, mollusks, or ammonoids. Furthermore, they have come to the conclusion that these species inhabited the Earth’s waters less than a million years after the Permian-Triassic Extinction, invalidating the long-lasting research held for 50-years that only found a few simple organisms in this time period.
“What’s even more surprising is that this life rebounded faster and spread farther [throughout all of Earth’s ocean] than what previous research ever observed,” Scientist Benjamin P. Kear said.
This discovery has proved to be a major breakthrough in evolution, proving that life recovers, adapts, and diversifies much faster than previously thought. Understanding that complex organisms inhabited the oceans along with the simple clams and fishes allows scientists to create more accurate models of ocean life in the early Triassic period, and has a very strong potential as serving as a catalyst for major advancements in finding how life on Earth came to be what it is today.
“Evolution, a fact rather than mere hypothesis, is the central unifying concept in biology. By extension, it affects almost all other fields of knowledge and thought and must be considered one of the most influential concepts in Western thought,” Evolutionist Jay Gould said.
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