Antarctica was climate refuge during great extinction

[n2doc]

13:09 03 December 2009 by Shanta Barley


The cool climate of Antarctica was a refuge for animals fleeing climate change during the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history, suggests a new fossil study. The discovery may have implications for how modern animals will adapt to global warming.

Around 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, about 90 per cent of land species were wiped out as global temperatures soared. A cat-sized distant relative of mammals, Kombuisia antarctica, seems to have survived the extinction by fleeing south to Antarctica.

Jörg Fröbisch, a geologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, and colleagues rediscovered fossils of K. antarctica dating from the end of the Permian among specimens collected from Antarctica over 30 years ago. The fossil hoard had been assembled for the American Museum of Natural History as evidence of the existence of the ancient supercontinent Pangaea, in which all today's continents were locked together in one land mass.

Analysis of two skulls belonging to K. antarctica suggest it was a small herbivore, no more than 40 centimetres in length. Though more closely related to mammals than to reptiles, its lifestyle was distinctly reptilian: it laid eggs and had a horny, turtle-like beak. Fossils of close relatives have been found in South Africa, so it probably lived throughout south Pangaea before the mass extinction.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18231-antarctica-was-climate-refuge-during-great-extinction.html

[clear eye]

1. Um, most of them didn't "adapt".

All this means that it's possible we won't extinguish all life on earth when we wipe out ourselves and other high-energy, mostly mammalian species that depend on a well-oxygenated atmosphere and abundant food. (The die-offs of the ocean's phytoplankton will drastically reduce oxygen.) Tortoises and insects will probably do o.k. in cooler areas.