Parareptiles and the End-Permian Extinction

The pareiasaur parareptile Scutosaurus. Credit: Professor Mike Benton


The researchers found that, surprisingly, parareptiles were not hit much harder by the end-Permian extinction than at any other point in their 90 million-year history. Furthermore, the group as a whole declined and diversified time and time again throughout its history, and it was not until about 50 million years after the end-Permian crisis that the parareptiles finally disappeared.


Dr Marcello Ruta. Credit: University of Bristol

By studying the fossil record, palaeontologists can examine how individual groups of organisms responded to the end-Permian event and assess just how dramatic it was. However, as the quality and completeness of the fossil record varies considerably, both geographically and stratigraphically, palaeontologists need to find a way to ‘join the dots’ and piece together the fragments of a complex mosaic to give a more satisfactory and better picture of ancient life’s diversity.

The team led by Dr Marcello Ruta of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, and including scientists from Germany, Brazil and North America, used the evolutionary relationships among known parareptiles to produce a corrected estimate of changing diversity through time.

Dr Marcello Ruta said: “Evolutionary relationships can be superimposed on a time scale, allowing you to infer missing portions of past diversity. They are powerful tools that complement and refine the known record of extinct diversity. If you visualize evolutionary relationships in the form of branching diagrams and then plot them on a time scale, new patterns begin to emerge, with gaps in the fossil record suddenly filling rapidly.”

A plot of data on mass extinctions. Extinction events have played a major role in the evolution of the life we’re familiar with on Earth today. Credit: University of Chicago


Co-author Johannes Müller of the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin added: “Researchers who investigate changing diversity through time have a huge battery of basic and advanced analytical and statistical methods at their disposal to study patterns of diversification and extinction. Classic text-book views of waxing and waning of groups through deep time will certainly benefit, where possible, from the use of evolutionary thinking.”


The new findings are published online in the journal Palaeontology.