Early Permian Pangea ‘B’ to Late Permian Pangea ‘A’☆

Climatically driven biogeographic provinces of Late Triassic tropical Pangea.

Although continents were coalesced into the single landmass Pangea, Late Triassic terrestrial tetrapod assemblages are surprisingly provincial. In eastern North America, we show that assemblages dominated by traversodont cynodonts are restricted to a humid 6° equatorial swath that persisted for over 20 million years characterized by "semiprecessional" (approximately 10,000-y) climatic fluctuati...

Mobility of Pangea: Implications for Late Paleozoic and Early Mesozoic Paleoclimate

Several recent analyses of paleomagnetic data support the concept of Pangea, an assemblage of most of the world’s continents that was mobile in terms of large-scale internal deformation and with respect to paleolatitude. The main feature of internal deformation involved the transformation from a Pangea B–type configuration in the late Paleozoic, with northwestern South America adjacent to easte...

Prolonged Permian Triassic ecological crisis recorded by molluscan dominance in Late Permian offshore assemblages.

The end-Permian mass extinction was the largest biotic crisis in the history of animal life, eliminating as many as 95% of all species and dramatically altering the ecological structure of marine communities. Although the causes of this pronounced ecosystem shift have been widely debated, the broad consensus based on inferences from global taxonomic diversity patterns suggests that the shift fr...

Permian Coal Forest offers a glimpse of late Paleozoic ecology.

L ittle evokes a sense of wonder about the past like moments frozen in time: the contorted bodies of Pompeii’s horrified citizens fixed in their final poses, the footprints of an ancient hominin family cemented on an African savanna, the tracks of a Jurassic predator closing in on unsuspecting prey along a muddy riverbank, or tree stumps from an ancient Carboniferous rainforest buried in place ...

Late Paleozoic continental warming of a cold tropical basin and floristic change in western Pangea