Nature Communications (Jan 2019)

No mass extinction for land plants at the Permian–Triassic transition

  • Hendrik Nowak,
  • Elke Schneebeli-Hermann,
  • Evelyn Kustatscher

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07945-w
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 1
pp. 1 – 8

Abstract

Read online

It has been thought that land plants suffered a mass extinction along with animals at the end of the Permian. Here, Nowak et al. show that the apparent plant mass extinction is a result of biases in the fossil record and their reanalysis suggests a lower magnitude and more selective plant extinction.