A new fossil site in China is providing clues to how life on Earth recovered from one of the greatest mass extinctions in the planet's history, researchers say.
Around 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, a sustained period of massive volcanic eruptions and devastating global warming wiped out almost all life on the planet, with only about 10 percent of species surviving.
The survivors formed the basis for the recovery of life in the following Triassic time period, and fossils from the site at Luoping in China's southwest Yunnan Province are giving scientists insight into the recovery, ScienceDaily.com reported Thursday.
"The Luoping site dates from the Middle Triassic and contains one of the most diverse marine fossil records in the world," Mike Benton of the University of Bristol said.
"We can tell that we're looking at a fully recovered ecosystem because of the diversity of predators, most notably fish and reptiles," he said. "It's a much greater diversity than what we see in the Early Triassic — and it's close to pre-extinction levels.
"The fossils at Luoping have told us a lot about the recovery and development of marine ecosystems after the end-Permian mass extinction," Benton said. "There's still more to be discovered there, and we hope to get an even better picture of how life reasserted itself after the most catastrophic global event in the history of our planet."
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