Ask the Experts: The Great Dying

Dinosaurs and their extinction is a well-documented phenomenon - who hasn’t watched at least one of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park movies or a BBC documentary on the extinction that ended the reign of the dinosaurs?

But two hundred and fifty million years ago, before the non-avian dinosaurs disappeared from land, mosasaurs and plesiosaurs the seas and pterosaurs from the skies there was a lesser-known obliteration that brutally concluded the Permian period, which followed the Carboniferous and preceded the Triassic era.

A mass extinction so powerful, so deadly, it destroyed the majority of Earth and species that had lived and survived during the vast time period spanning two hundred and ninety-nine, to two hundred and fifty-one million years ago.

Back at the beginning of the Permian era, Earth struggled to deal with the after effects of the Carboniferous period: the residue of the Ice Age and the depletion of the Rainforests.  In time, as the temperature increased the glaciers receded and the Earths interior dried out, leaving Earth hot and arid.

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