After The Largest Extinction Event on Earth, These Animals Were The First to Recover

The Great Dying, also known as the Permian–Triassic extinction event, almost ended life on Earth due to the way it decimated life on the planet. It is the most severe extinction event that has ever happened.

New research shows that deposit feeders like worms and shrimps were the first to bounce back after life did recover.

A detailed dating of trails and burrows on the South China sea bed shows that suspension feeders followed. The remains of animal activity were found in the analysis.

How the oceans may have looked before (A) and after (B-F) the extinction. (X.Feng/Z.-Q.Chen/M.J. Benton/Y. Jiang)

"We were able to look at trace fossils from 26 sections through the entire series of events, which is 7 million crucial years of time," says Michael Benton, from the University of Bristol in the UK.

We reconstructed the recovery stages of all the animals at 400 sampling points.

Soft-bodied animals don't have skeletons to leave behind so trace fossils are important in figuring out how they lived. The team was able to look at how other species recovered after the deposit feeders were established.

The end-Permian crisis was caused by global warming and ocean acidification, but trace-making animals may have been selected against by the environment.

Soft-bodied animals' resilience to high CO 2 and warming is revealed by trace fossil data. It is possible that these engineers may have played a role in the recovery of the benthic ecosystems after mass extinctions.

The team looked at four different metrics to measure recovery: diversity, disparity, how varied those different types were, and how habitats were changed by the animal.

First, life began to return in the deepest waters. After deposit feeders had recovered, suspension feeders such as brachiopods, bryozoans and bivalves followed.

The corals began to come back. It took 3 million years for soft-bodied people to return to their pre-extinction levels.

It's no surprise that it took a long time for the marine life to recover after the extinction. Scientists can get a more complete picture of what happened when they add trace fossil records to the data.

Climate change, global warming, a drop in oxygen and increased ocean acidification are thought to be the primary drivers behind the mass extinction.

Understanding how certain animals recovered in the wake of the Great Dying will allow us to figure out how these creatures will fare in the current period of warming.

The research was published in a journal.