Mass extinctions aren’t all bad news: survivors bounce back stronger, fitter, faster and smarter than before. Paleontologists studying the deadliest mass extinction of all time, the end of the Permian, 252 million years ago, have shown that predators quickly became faster and deadlier, while prey animals adapted and they found new ways to survive.
Amazing assemblages of fossil fish from China reveal that new modes of hunting arose earlier than thought, including fish with masses of teeth, adapted for crushing shells, and streamlined “lizard” fish specialized in ambushes, shooting from murky burrows. Meanwhile, the animals they preyed on had to develop defenses. “Some got thicker shells, developed spines or became faster to help them escape,” said Feixiang Wu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, whose findings appear in Frontiers in Earth Science.
On land, reptiles became faster, while mammals and birds became warm-blooded, allowing them to move faster for longer periods of time. “Mass extinctions were, of course, terrible news for all victims. But the mass removal of ecosystems provided a great number of opportunities for the biosphere to rebuild itself, and it did so at a higher octane than before the crisis,” says Michael Benton of the University of Bristol.