Extinction and recovery patterns of the vegetation across the Cretaceous–Palaeogene boundary — a tool for unravelling the causes of the end-Permian mass-extinction

The Meishan section across the Permian-Triassic boundary in South China is the most thoroughly investigated in the world. A statistical analysis of the occurrences of 162 genera and 333 species confirms a sudden extinction event at 251.4 million years ago, coincident with a dramatic depletion of delta13C(carbonate) and an increase in microspherules.

Rarefaction analysis of extinctions in the Late Permian indicates that as many as 96 percent of all marine species may have died out, thus forcing the marine biosphere to pass through a small bottleneck. With such severity of extinction, chance elimination of certain biologic groups would have been probable. Some of the changes in biologic composition observed at the Permo-Triassic boundary may be explained as an evolutionary founder effect that followed the bottleneck.