Study shows Earth's first known mass extinction event 550 million years ago
A new study by Virginia Tech geobiologists traces the cause of the first known mass extinction of animals to decreased global oxygen availability, leading to the loss of a majority of animals present near the end of the Ediacaran Period some 550 million years ago.
The research spearheaded by Scott Evans, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geosciences, part of the Virginia Tech College of Science, shows this earliest mass extinction of about 80 percent of animals across this interval. "This included the loss of many different types of animals, however those whose body plans and behaviors indicate that they relied on significant amounts of oxygen seem to have been hit particularly hard," Evans said. "This suggests that the extinction event was environmentally controlled, as are all other mass extinctions in the geologic record."
Evans' work was published Nov. 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was co-authored by Shuhai Xiao, also a professor in the Department of Geosciences, and several researchers led by Mary Droser from the University of California Riverside's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, where Evans earned his master's degree and Ph.D.
"Environmental changes, such as global warming and deoxygenation events, can lead to massive extinction of animals and profound disruption and reorganization of the ecosystem," said Xiao, who is an affiliated member of the Global Change Center, part of the Virginia Tech Fralin Life Sciences Institute. "This has been demonstrated repeatedly in the study of Earth history, including this work on the first extinction documented in the fossil record. This study thus informs us
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