Global warming spawned the age of reptiles
Researchers can examine the effects of environmental crises on organismal evolution by looking at major extinctions brought on by climate change that occurred in the distant past. The Permian-Triassic climatic crises, a sequence of climatic changes brought on by global warming that took place between the Middle Permian (265 million years ago) and Middle Triassic, serve as one prominent example (230 million years ago). At the conclusion of the Permian, these climatic changes led to two of the worst mass extinctions in the history of life, the first occurring at 261 million years ago and the second at 252 million years ago, the latter wiping out 86% of all animal species worldwide. The end-Permian extinctions were significant not only because of their size but also because they signaled the beginning of a new period in Earth's history, one in which reptiles predominated as the main group of land-dwelling vertebrates. Synapsids, the forerunners of mammals, dominated the land vertebrat...