No mass extinction for land plants at the Permian–Triassic transition

The most severe mass extinction among animals took place in the latest Permian (ca. 252 million years ago). Due to scarce and impoverished fossil floras from the earliest Triassic, the common perception has been that land plants likewise suffered a mass extinction, but doubts remained. Here we use g...

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Autores principales: Nowak, Hendrik, Schneebeli-Hermann, Elke, Kustatscher, Evelyn
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2019
Materias:
Article
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6344494/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30674875
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07945-w
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author Nowak, Hendrik
Schneebeli-Hermann, Elke
Kustatscher, Evelyn
author_facet Nowak, Hendrik
Schneebeli-Hermann, Elke
Kustatscher, Evelyn
author_sort Nowak, Hendrik
collection PubMed
description The most severe mass extinction among animals took place in the latest Permian (ca. 252 million years ago). Due to scarce and impoverished fossil floras from the earliest Triassic, the common perception has been that land plants likewise suffered a mass extinction, but doubts remained. Here we use global occurrence data of both plant macro- and microfossils to analyse plant biodiversity development across the Permian–Triassic boundary. We show that the plant fossil record is strongly biased and that evidence for a mass extinction among plants in the latest Permian is not robust. The taxonomic diversities of gymnosperm macrofossils and of the pollen produced by this group are particularly incongruent. Our results indicate that gymnosperm macrofossils are considerably undersampled for the Early Triassic, which creates the impression of increased gymnosperm extinction in the latest Permian.
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spelling pubmed-63444942019-01-25 No mass extinction for land plants at the Permian–Triassic transition Nowak, Hendrik Schneebeli-Hermann, Elke Kustatscher, Evelyn Nat Commun Article The most severe mass extinction among animals took place in the latest Permian (ca. 252 million years ago). Due to scarce and impoverished fossil floras from the earliest Triassic, the common perception has been that land plants likewise suffered a mass extinction, but doubts remained. Here we use global occurrence data of both plant macro- and microfossils to analyse plant biodiversity development across the Permian–Triassic boundary. We show that the plant fossil record is strongly biased and that evidence for a mass extinction among plants in the latest Permian is not robust. The taxonomic diversities of gymnosperm macrofossils and of the pollen produced by this group are particularly incongruent. Our results indicate that gymnosperm macrofossils are considerably undersampled for the Early Triassic, which creates the impression of increased gymnosperm extinction in the latest Permian. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-01-23 /pmc/articles/PMC6344494/ /pubmed/30674875 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07945-w Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Nowak, Hendrik
Schneebeli-Hermann, Elke
Kustatscher, Evelyn
No mass extinction for land plants at the Permian–Triassic transition
title No mass extinction for land plants at the Permian–Triassic transition
title_full No mass extinction for land plants at the Permian–Triassic transition
title_fullStr No mass extinction for land plants at the Permian–Triassic transition
title_full_unstemmed No mass extinction for land plants at the Permian–Triassic transition
title_short No mass extinction for land plants at the Permian–Triassic transition
title_sort no mass extinction for land plants at the permian–triassic transition
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6344494/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30674875
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07945-w
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