EARTH, 255 million years ago. The curtain is falling on a Lost World fantasy. At its peak, our Palaeozoic planet boasted lush forests packed with 30-metre-tall relatives of the tiny club mosses and horsetails that exist today. Giant 2.5-metre-long millipedes scuttled across the ground, while dragonfly-like insects with wing spans of 70 centimetres flitted through the skies. The seas swarmed with scorpion-like creatures over 2 metres long and predatory fish of 10 metres and more.
Some 252 million years ago, this world was gone – transformed by the most traumatic wave of extinctions life on our planet has ever experienced. The mass killing that ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago grabs all the headlines, but it snuffed out only three-quarters of plant and animal species. The "Great Dying" – more formally known as the Permian-Triassic or end-Permian extinction – did ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.
