There’s nothing like a big mass extinction to open up ecological niches and clear out the competition, accelerating evolution for some lucky survivors. Or is there? A new study suggests that the rate of climate change may play just as large a role in speeding up evolution.
The study focuses on reptile evolution across 57 million years — before, during and after the mass extinction at the end of the Permian Period (SN: 12/6/18). That extinction event, triggered by carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere and oceans through increased volcanic activity about 252 million years ago, knocked out a whopping 86 percent of Earth’s species. Yet reptiles recovered from the chaos relatively well. Their exploding diversity of species around that time has been widely regarded as a result of their slithering into newly available niches.
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