Learn about the climate changes that followed the end-Permian extinction, allowing select species to take over the planet's oceans.

After Earth's worst mass extinction, surviving ocean animals spread worldwide. Stanford's model shows why this happened.

proposed multiple mechanisms for why different locations had remarkably similar inhabitants following the end-Permian extinction. One hypothesis is "ecological release," where the die-offs of certain ...

These toughened-up creatures represented a crucial innovation ... the world's oceans until they were wiped out in the Permian extinctions about 250 million years ago. Photograph by James L.