A million years after the famous Permian extinction of animals and plants there was another similar event.
Paleontologists from Switzerland found that approximately 250 million years ago on the border of Permian and Triassic rocks occurred on a previously unknown global extinction of plants.
A study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Scientists studied sediments located in the North-East Greenland in a layer thickness of 400 meters. The contents of carbon isotopes and analysis of seeds and spores showed that about 250 million years ago for several millennia seed ferns and conifers were replaced by spore plants. This is a direct symptom of the disaster, which resulted in the ferns survive better than the seed plants.
Scientists don’t know the reason for the extinction of plants (and probably animals). It is not excluded that it could be the eruption of volcanoes, in particular, in Siberia.
Instructions for several extinctions that happened 250 million years ago, the experts also received as a result of studies of sediments from Pakistan and Australia.
About 252 million years ago was one of the five mass extinctions known to science, in which the face of the planet disappeared almost all marine species and two-thirds of the species of reptiles and amphibians. For a few thousand years, the biodiversity of organisms recovered. Open Swiss scientists, the accident occurred approximately 500 thousand years after the Permian extinction.
