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Recovering From A Mass ExtinctionFossilised skull of the sabre-toothed Lycaenops, a top predator of the latest Permian. (Credit: Photo by Michael Benton) ScienceDaily (Jan. 20, 2008) — The full recovery of ecological systems, following the most devastating extinction event of all time, took at least 30 million years, according to new research from the University of Bristol. About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian, a major extinction event killed over 90 per cent of life on earth, including insects, plants, marine animals, amphibians, and reptiles. Ecosystems were destroyed worldwide, communities were restructured and organisms were left...

Ancient mega-catastrophe paved way for the dinosaurs, spawned Australian continent. Planetary scientists have found evidence of a meteor impact much larger and earlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs -- an impact that they believe caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history.The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And the gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out.Its size and location -- in the Wilkes Land...

An apparent crater as big as Ohio has been found in Antarctica. Scientists think it was carved by a space rock that caused the greatest mass extinction on Earth, 250 million years ago. The crater, buried beneath a half-mile of ice and discovered by some serious airborne and satellite sleuthing, is more than twice as big as the one involved in the demise of the dinosaurs. The crater's location, in the Wilkes Land region of East Antarctica, south of Australia, suggests it might have instigated the breakup of the so-called Gondwana supercontinent, which pushed Australia northward, the researchers said. "This...

CAPE CHARLES, Va. - Geologists drilling half a mile below Virginia's Eastern Shore say they have uncovered more signs of a space rock's impact 35 million years ago. For more than two weeks, scientists drilled around the clock alongside a parking lot across the harbor from Cape Charles. They stopped at 2,700 feet. From the depths came jumbled, mixed bits of crystalline and melted rock that can be dated, as well as marine deposits, brine and other evidence of an ancient comet or asteroid that slammed into once-shallow waters near the Delmarva Peninsula. Cape Charles is considered Ground Zero for...

New clues to 2bn-year-old murder Tim Radford, science editor Friday May 14, 2004 The Guardian Scientists believe they are on the track of the biggest mass murderer in the two-billion year history of life. A buried crater off Australia could be the first direct evidence of a celestial assassin that wiped out more than 80% of life on Earth 250m years ago. Luann Becker, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, reports in Science online today on extensive evidence for a 125-mile wide crater called Bedout off the northwestern coast of Australia. The clues match the date of an event...

As It Happened: The Day the Earth Nearly Died 8pm, SBS (2.30am, Perth) THINK of the wonderful profusion of life on Earth today. Then imagine 95 per cent of it dying in a terrible cataclysm. As this program from the BBC's Horizon series tells us, it's not a fantasy, it happened 250 million years ago, bringing the Permian period, with its myriad strange life-forms, crashing to an end and sending evolution into an abrupt reverse. The Permian mass extinction dwarfed the demise of the dinosaurs, caused by an asteroid strike 65 million years ago, when 60 per cent of species...