Physiology offers mechanistic insight into Permian-Triassic mass extinction

In collaboration with Stanford colleague Jon Payne and University of Washinton colleagues Curtis Deutsch and Justin Penn, Erik Sperling published a new paper in the journal Science investigating the causes of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. The paper uses a physiological model (the Metabolic Index) to explore how the synergistic effects of warming and marine oxygen depletion could have driven the extinction. The results indicate that these two factors can explain the majority of species extinctions, and that they drove a latitudinal extinction gradient that we can recover in new analyses of the fossil record. The next step in robustly applying the Metabolic Index to the fossil record is obtaining more physiological data from clades common in the fossil record--brachiopods, bryozoans, crinoids, echinoderms, molluscs, etc. The Historical Geobiology Lab is looking forward to a summer at Pacific Northwest field stations to make these measurements!

The paper by Penn et al. can be accessed here: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/eaat1327