A lot of people believe that an extinction period is always a bad thing. This is not true, extinction periods can be and have been really good things. Extinctions periods have been very useful to humans. If it weren’t for extinction periods everything that we know of today wouldn’t be here. Extinctions open the opportunity for some species to evolve and thrive. This is how most of the species on earth today are here. Are ancestors were able use the extinction of another and more dominant species to survive, thrive, and evolved with ease. Extinctions empty niches and let other species evolve and grow. Three examples of extinctions that led to the evolution of different species are the Ordovician Extinction and how it led to the Do
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As this was happening amphibians were filling up costal niches with competition. The Devonian era just came to an end so there were a lot of emptied niches that needed to be filled with new life. Amphibians began to fill up coastal niches. In order to do so, these amphibians needed to evolve. Some amphibians were able to evolve and make there way to the beaches. They evolved by developing less porous skin to venture further inland without drying out. They also started to lay eggs and this meant that they didn’t have to return to the water to reproduce. After the amphibians evolved the Permian era came along. Many of the forests dried out killing a lot of plant life. The resultant of this was the Permian era. In the Permian era there were just deserts because many of the forests have just dried out. Reptiles thrived in the environment. This is because there was less competition from forest and river dwellers. The ancestor’s of all mammals evolved in the Permian era. This is the synapsids. They are the ancestors of everything from you, your cat, monkeys, and even whales. At the end of the Permian era there was once again extinction. This extinction event is thought to be caused by an environmental disaster caused by volcanoes in Siberia. The Permian Extinction took out 90% of the marine life and 70% of the terrestrial life. Our ancestor the synapsids was hit very hard and because of this a space for huge adaptive radiation of giant reptiles was left. If it weren’t for the Permian extinction there wouldn’t have been dinosaurs on the planet. The era in which the dinosaurs lived was called the Triassic
The biggest mass extinction of the past 600 million years (My), the end-Permian event (251 My ago), witnessed the loss of as much as 95% of all species on Earth. Key questions for biologists concern what combination of environmental changes could possibly have had such a devastating effect, the scale and pattern of species loss, and the nature of the recovery. New studies on dating the event, contemporary volcanic activity, and the anatomy of the environmental crisis have changed our perspectives dramatically in the past five years. Evidence on causation is equivocal, with support for either an asteroid impact or mass volcanism, but the latter seems most probable.
The Permian-Triassic Extinction is a mass extinction that occurred between the Permian and Triassic geologic time periods approximately 250 million years ago; it is the deadliest of all extinctions that have occurred on Earth. In addition, during the Permian-Triassic extinction the continents of today existed as one supercontinent known as Pangaea. This was the first time in history where continental or land mass exceeded that of the ocean. This was also before dinosaurs of the Triassic period roamed Earth, during this time animals such as the therapsids, and Synapsids such as the Pelycosaurs, insects and amphibians also occupied Earth. Fauna that existed during the Permian period includes Gymnosperms, or seed producing plants such as the Conifers. Other animals that existed during this time include marine life such as brachiopods (clams), bryozoans (coral-like skeletons), bony fish and sharks, as well as crinoids (sea urchin like creatures). According to National Geographic, about 90 percent of all the animals and fauna of this period perished, the marine life was hit the hardest wi...
The main group of animals that went extinct during this time, leaving smaller reptiles, birds, and mammals, were the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs dominated the land and ranged from being smaller than a rooster, to being greater than the size of fifteen adult elephants. There were herbivores, carnivores, insectivores, omnivores, and detritivores. Herbivores would often live in herds, like deer or cows. Large carnivores, like the tyrannosaurs were usually solitary hunters and smaller carnivores, like the raptors --Creatures around the size of a person, with razor sharp teeth, slashing claws, and large brains, Would hunt in sophisticated packs. One of the dinosaurs defining characteristics was that they took time to take care of their young, protecting them from predators and making sure they got enough food to eat; this differs from most reptiles (Digging into Dinosaurs 4-5). For example today’s largest lizard, the komodo dragon, will eat its own young if the young do not get away, so they have to hide up in the trees. Dinosaurs were not even buil...
The Permian Triassic extinction was an event of cataclysmic disaster and almost the extinction of all species on planet earth. The Permian Triassic extinction is said to have occurred millions of years ago, geologist have estimated that its occurrences happened about 248 million to 286 million years ago. This rare occurrence of events proceeded the Triassic geologic periods and the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras. This mass disaster was the largest dissipation of living life on planet earth; it is believed to be even superior to other crises such as the Ordovician and Devonian events and the conclusion of the cretaceous era that came upon the dinosaurs.
This breaking up of the mega continent of Pangaea allowed for more diversification of plant species and as the continents continued to break apart, plant life became even more diversified. As the continents shifted and moved from one area of the ocean to another the climates began to change drastically which allowed for plant and dinosaur species both to begin adapting to suit their new ecosystems. All the water that was produced by the split of Pangaea gave the previously hot and dry climate a more humid and drippy subtropical weather. Dry deserts took on a greener look. Before the Mesozoic Era, livings things were confined to only surviving in the oceans. It was not until the Jurassic Period that livings things evolved the capability of living on the land rather than just the ocean. Towards the beginning of the Jurassic, plant life evolved from Bryophytes, the low-growin...
Extinctions happen everywhere on the world that has increasingly fluctuating weather. Before the Industrial Revolution, the days prior to humans pumping the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, the earth was moderately temperate. Today, the average temperature is 64° F, almost 10° F above normal. Because of the climate change, the polar caps are melting, making the Artic inhospitable to a serious of taxonomic groups, which are now in danger of extinction. Since all the glaciers are thawing, the newly liquefied water is flooding into the oceans. The sea-level rise devastates coastally ecology, erodes beaches, and floods agriculture land. This affects the habitats of plants, birds, and sea life, meaning they no longer have a safe place to have their young. With no new offspring, the species cease to exist. The continents most affected by the Holocene extinction are North and South America because that is where a majority of the megafauna lived thousand of years ago; of these was the Woolly mammoth. In the 1800’s, the ecosystem (over hunted and deforested) was not resilient enough to protect themselves from the industrial e...
Earth has gone through five fully major extinctions before. We currently are in the process of Earth’s sixth mass extinction. This mass extinction is closely related in severity to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Earth’s extinctions are broken into three different areas. The first area was the large number of animals caught by hunter-gathers. The discovery of agriculture led to the second area of extinction, wildlife habitats. These wildlife habitats were destroyed due to humans starting to stay in one area.
...iod. The glacier formation led to the enormous decrease of the sea level which dried out the swamps. Swamps form because of the water level was high and flooded the forest so the low sea level really affected the huge swamps areas of the Carboniferous period. The climate changed from hot and humid to cool. The plants couldn’t adapt to this change so most of the ones that flourished during the time period died off but it led to new plants forming. Most of the amphibians that were prosperous during this time also couldn’t adapt to the environmental climate change so most died off. The insects also couldn’t live through the change. The reptiles however made it through the climate change. They were able to adapt unlike all the other species they lived with during the carboniferous period. These environment changes eventually led to a new time period, the Permian Period.
seems like it happened so sudden, as geologic time goes, that almost all the dinosaurs
Extinction, although not as pleasant a concept as the idea of adapting to ones surroundings, plays just as large a role in natural selection as anything else. As one adaptation of a species proves beneficial, and as that variation begins to propagate, the original, less advantageous variant will die off. It is the unchanged species that are in immediate conflict with the species undergoing the natural adaptation that stand to suffer...
The Jurassic Period of our earth’s history was one of great change. It began with a major extinction even, bounced back, and was yet again the victim of an extinction event. The Jurassic was a flourishing time of new species adapting, changing, and modernizing to suit the ever-changing world they
Several mass extinctions have occurred during the Earth’s history. The Cretaceous – Tertiary Boundary (K-T) Extinction caused the loss of at least three-quarters of all species known at that time including the dinosaurs. The cause of this mass extinction is a controversial subject among scientists but the fossil evidence of it’s occurrence is abundant.
Critics claim that species vanish and new ones appear all the time. That’s true, if you’re talking in terms of millennia. Species disappear at an approximate rate of one species per million per year, with new species replacing the lost ones at about the same rate. Although lately humans caused the extinction rate to severely increase, to where entire species are annihilated each day. Nature will take millions of years to repair what is destroyed in just a few decades.
Norell, Mark, Lowell Dingus, and Eugene S. Gaffney. "Why Did Nonavian Dinosaurs Become Extinct?" Discovering Dinosaurs: Evolution, Extinction, and the Lessons of Prehistory. Berkeley: U of California, 1995. N. pag. Print.
Because the CO2 levels are rising, the ice caps are melting and many more animals can become extinct. When pangea started splitting, there was a lot of volcanic activity, which cause the death of many dinosaurs. A meteor also hit earth and the mass extinction of many land and marine animals happened. There have been five mass extinctions in Earth’s history. The worst one wiped out ninety-six percent of marine life and seventy percent of land organisms. This took millions of years to recover.