The Great Dying
The worst catastrophe life has ever suffered: around 95% of marine species gone.
- When
- Known to
- ± 500 thousand years
- Era
- Triassic, Mesozoic
About 251.9 million years ago some 90 to 96% of marine species and roughly 70% of terrestrial vertebrate genera are lost — by a wide margin the most severe extinction in the fossil record. Volcanic carbon dioxide drives rapid global warming of perhaps 8 to 10°C, and with it ocean acidification, the spread of anoxic and sulfidic water, and collapse of the ozone layer. Trilobites, which had survived 270 million years and three mass extinctions, die out entirely, along with the rugose and tabulate corals and the last of the sea scorpions.