Triassic Park: A Decade-Long Labor To Recreate A Lost World

Dead Things iconDead Things
By Gemma Tarlach
Mar 28, 2018 8:00 AMJan 24, 2020 7:49 PM
Teleocrater_mid-Triassic-1024x576.jpg
Researchers spent a decade working at remote African sites to fill in serious gaps in our understanding of life at the Dawn of the Dinosaur Age. The scene, including dino-relative Teleocrater in foreground, illustrates what mid-Triassic Tanzania might have looked like 240 million years ago. (Credit Mark Witton/Natural History Museum, London)

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You've probably heard about The Great Dying, more formally known as the End-Permian mass extinction, when more than 95 percent of species worldwide went extinct. This darkest hour in the story of life on Earth occurred some 251 million years ago, most likely the result of monstrous, region-wide volcanic activity in Siberia that acidified the oceans, wrecked the climate and may have even ripped open the ozone layer to allow in rather nasty levels of ultraviolet radiation.

But...what happened next?

Life got knocked down, but it got up again. (Apologies if you now have an earworm stuck in your head. Actually, no. I'm not sorry at all.)

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