New Fossils from Tanzania and Zambia Shed Light on End-Permian Mass Extinction

Paleontologists have identified the myriad of animals – saber tooth predators, bubblers to work and a large creature in the shape of a salamander – who prospered in the south of the Pangea just before the end of the end mass, about 252 million years ago.

An artistic rendering of an evening approximately 252 million years ago during the time of the Upper Permian in the Luangwa basin in Zambia. The scene includes several Gorgonopsiens with saber teeth and beak dicynodontes. Image credit: Gabriel Ugueto.

“The final mass extinction of the end was simply a cataclysm for life on earth and changed the course of evolution,” said Washington professor Christian Sidor.

“But we do not have a complete vision of surviving species, which did not do it, and why.”

“The fossils that we have collected in Tanzania and Zambia will give us a more global perspective on this unprecedented period of the natural history of our planet.”

All the new fossils have been searched in three basins across southern Africa: the Ruhuhu basin in southern Tanzania, the Luangwa basin in the east of Zambia and the Zambezi medium in the south of Zambia.

Most have been discovered by team members during multiple trips of a month -long excavation in the region in the past 17 years.

Others were analyzes of specimens unearthed previous decades that had been stored in museum collections.

“These parts of Zambia and Tanzania contain absolutely magnificent fossils of the permien,” said Professor Sidor.

“They give us an unprecedented vision of life on land leading to mass extinction.”

The Permian period is the end of what paleontologists call the Paleozoic era.

Meanwhile, animal life – which has evolved first in the oceans of the earth – began to colonize the land and complex terrestrial ecosystems developed.

By the permien, a diversified range of amphibian and reptile -type creatures traveled from the environments ranging from the first forests to the arid valleys.

The final mass extinction has erased many of these ecosystems and inaugurated the mesozoic era, which saw the evolution of dinosaurs, as well as the first birds, flower plants and mammals.

For decades, the best understanding of permian scientists, the extinction of the final mass and the permien and the beginning of the mesozoic came from the Karoo basin in South Africa, which contains an almost complete fossil file of periods before and after mass extinction.

But from the 1930s, paleontologists realized that the pools in Tanzania and Zambia contain fossil recordings of this period which are almost as virgin as the Karoo.

Excavation trips by the authors represent the greatest analysis to date of the region’s fossil file before and after the extinction of final mass.

“The number of specimens we have found in Zambia and Tanzania is so high and their condition is so exquisite that we can make comparisons in the species with what paleontologists have found in South Africa,” said Professor Sidor.

“I do not know a better place on earth to obtain sufficient details of this period to make these conclusions and detailed comparisons.”

In a series of 14 articles in the Journal of Vertebrate PaleontologyResearchers describe a number of new species of dicynodontes.

These small hollowed -out and dug herbivores have evolved for the first time in the middle of the Permian.

At the time of mass extinction, the dicynodontes – many of which displayed a beak muzzle with two small defenses which probably helped burrows – were the aters of dominant plants on earth.

The results also include several new species of large predators to the saber tooth called Gorgonopsiens, as well as a new species of temprosondyl, a large amphibian similar to a salamander.

“We can now compare two different geographic regions of Pangea and see what was going on both before and after the end mass extinction of the end,” said Professor Sidor.

“We can really start asking questions about who has survived and who didn’t do it.”