When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time. Este artículo no está disponible.When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time

The implications of the mass extinction 251 million years ago told in an accessible, page-turning way

It is common knowledge that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite impact 65 million years ago that killed half of all species then living. Far less well-known is a much greater catastrophe that took place 250 million years ago: at least 90 per cent of life was destroyed, including sabre-toothed reptiles and their rhinoceros-sized prey, as well as vast numbers of fish and other species in the sea.

This book documents not only what happened during this gigantic mass extinction, but also the recent rekindling of the idea of catastrophism. Was the end-Permian event caused by the impact of a huge meteorite or comet, or by prolonged volcanic eruption in Siberia? The evidence has been accumulating through the 1990s and into the new millennium, and Michael Benton gives his verdict at the end of the volume. From field camps in Greenland and Russia to the laboratory bench, When Life Nearly Died involves geologists, palaeontologists, environmental modellers, geochemists, astronomers and experts on biodiversity and conservation. Their working methods are vividly described and explained, and the current disputes are revealed. The implications of our understanding of crises in the past for the current biodiversity crisis are also presented in detail.

Michael Benton is a palaeontologist who has made fundamental contributions to understanding the history of life, particularly concerning how biodiversity changes through time. He has led in integrating data from living and fossil organisms to generate phylogenies ― solutions to the question of how major groups originated and diversified through time. This approach has revolutionised our understanding of major questions, including the relative roles of internal and external drivers on the history of life, whether diversity reaches saturation, the significance of mass extinctions, and how major clades radiate. A key theme is the Permo–Triassic mass extinction, the largest mass extinction of all time, which took place over 250 million years ago, where he investigates how life was able to recover from such a devastating event. Michael has written engaging books for children on the theme of dinosaurs, as well as a significant number of palaeontology textbooks for university students. He founded the MSc in Palaeobiology at Bristol in 1996, from which more than 450 students have graduated. He has supervised more than 70 PhD students.