Volcanic winters impacted the late Triassic biodiversity, but prototypical feathers insulated dinosaurs from the cold.
Though life in the oceans suffered a considerable loss of diversity during the extinction, most taxonomic groups made it through to the other side. When marine ecosystems rebounded during the early Jurassic period, it looked like what had come before.
“It was a mass extinction that happened to the modern fauna,” Bottjer says. “The organisms that survived then re-evolved in the oceans.”On land, organisms are even more vulnerable to extreme weather than their marine counterparts. While the ocean provides a buffer to the changes of atmospheric temperature, land organisms have nowhere to hide. During the late Triassic, the Earth became so hot that few plants or animals could survive in equatorial and tropical regions.
Even so, the period was not universally hot. “Volcanic winters” followed significant eruptions. As ash blocked out sunlight from pole to pole, temperatures plummeted and plants struggled to photosynthesize.were widespread in equatorial and tropical regions. Few of these cold-blooded scavengers and predators survived the end-Triassic. In a recent paper, Olsen and an international group of colleagues point to volcanic winters as a major driver of these extinctions.
But one clade of reptiles was already adapted to the cold. Early dinosaurs had developed insulating coats of feathers to access the rich vegetation found closer to the poles. This adaptationDinosaurs weren’t the only terrestrial animals to survive the end-Triassic. Proto-mammals may have burrowed into the ground to escape extreme temperatures. Crocodilians, the only surviving order ofThe earth’s temperature is rising today as it was at the tail end of the Triassic.
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