*shivers*

[gemfyre]

The Permian extinction freaks me out.

You have large synapsids - reptiles with alot of mammalian features, they would become mammals eventually, trilobites, eurypterids, loads of other species, a planet teeming with life...

then suddenly

90% of them disappear. All in the span of a few 100 thousand years.

Now 100 thousand years sounds likes AGES but when you think about it.
- Humans have been around for 2 million years or thereabouts
- Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 165 million years
- Dinosaurs have been extinct for 65 million years

100 thousand years is an instant. And a plethora of life just vanished during it. And we can only speculate as to why.

The Cretaceous extinction that took out the dinosaurs was NOTHING compared to this.

Oh, and by the way, we are in the midst of another mass extinction now, the only thing is humans are the cause.

Comments

[k-irill.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Freaky stuff. I remember there being something about it in the Science of Discworld.