US EditionArctic Fossils Show Ocean Life Rebounded Quickly After Mass Extinction
The fossil bonebed on Spitsbergen reveals marine ecosystems recovered within 3 million years after the end-Permian extinction, overturning the long-held gradual recovery model.
- On November 13, Scandinavian paleontologists published in the journal Science findings on more than 30,000 fossil elements from a 249 million-year-old marine community on Spitsbergen, Svalbard archipelago.
- The end-Permian mass extinction, the so-called 'great dying', wiped out over 90% of marine species, and paleontologists long hypothesized a long-standing gradual recovery hypothesis spanning multiple millions of years.
- On the mountainside the Spitsbergen bonebed weathered out and accumulated over a short geological timeframe, while 1 m2 grid sampling across 36 m2 recovered over 800 kg of fossils.
- The assemblage suggests the earliest radiation of land-living animals into oceanic ecosystems, with sea-going reptiles and amphibians originating earlier, opening niches that shaped modern marine communities.
- Found in 2015, the fossils required nearly a decade of work involving the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, using stratigraphic dating and advanced analytical techniques.
14 Articles
14 Articles
Textbooks Were Wrong: 249-Million-Year-Old Fossil Discovery Upends Timeline of Evolution
Newly analyzed Arctic fossils show that marine ecosystems recovered astonishingly fast after the “great dying.” More than 30,000 teeth, bones, and other fossil fragments from a 249-million-year-old marine ecosystem have been uncovered on the isolated Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The material comes from extinct marine reptiles, amphibians, bony fish, and sharks, and it captures the [...]
Vertebral microstructure marks the emergence of pelagic ichthyosaurs soon after the End Permian Mass Extinction - Scientific Reports
Ichthyosaurs were the first fully marine tetrapods, and evolved a streamlined body, flippers, live birth, and endothermy-like physiology. However, the transition to these adaptations and how it relates to divergence into ocean environments is ambiguous. Here, we use vertebral bone microstructure to document the first ontogenetic series of two Early Triassic taxa that include the oldest ichthyosaur foetal fossils. One series is from Grippia, an e…
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