What reptile's bones can teach us about Earth's perilous past
In fact, paleontologists at Yale, Sam Houston State University, and the University of the Witwatersrand say the 250-million-year-old reptile, known as Palacrodon, fills in an important gap in our understanding of reptile evolution. It's also a signal that reptiles, plants, and ecosystems may have fared better or recovered more quickly than previously thought after a mass extinction event wiped out most of the plant and animal species on the planet.
"We now know that Palacrodon comes from one of the last lineages to branch off the reptile tree of life before the evolution of modern reptiles," said Kelsey Jenkins, a doctoral student in Yale's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and first author of the study, which appears in the Journal of Anatomy. "We also know that Palacrodon lived in the wake of the most devastating mass extinction in Earth's history."
That would be the Permian-Triassic extinction event, which occurred 252 million years ago. Known as "the Great Dying," it killed off 70% of terrestrial species and 95% of marine species.
Although a large number of reptile species eventually bounced back from this extinction event, the details of how that happened are murky.
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-reptile-bones-earth-perilous.html
Extra Credit:
What reptoid species, if any, may have survived a catastrophic kinetic impact? Why would living concealed underground appeal to an intelligent species bombarded from space or orbital platforms? What is 'droning?'