The Permian ended with the largest of known mass extinctions in the history of life. This signal event has been difficult to recognize in Antarctic non-marine rocks, because the boundary with the Triassic is defined by marine fossils at a stratotype section in China. Late Permian leaves (Glossopteris) and roots Vertebraria), and Early Triassic leaves (Dicroidium) and vertebrates (Lystrosaurus) ...

Nonmarine fluvial, eolian and lacustrine strata of the Chinle and Glen Canyon groups on the southern Colorado Plateau preserve tetrapod body fossils and footprints that are one of the world's most extensive tetrapod fossil records across the Triassic– Jurassic boundary. We organize these tetrapod fossils into five, time-successive biostratigraphic assemblages (in ascending order, Owl Rock, Rock...

Nonmarine fluvial, eolian and lacustrine strata of the Chinle and Glen Canyon groups in northeastern Arizona and adjacent areas preserve tetrapod body fossils and footprints that are one of the world’s most extensive tetrapod fossil records across the Triassic-Jurassic boundary. We organize these tetrapod fossils into five, time-successive biostratigraphic assemblages (in ascending order, Owl R...

This issue of Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology is devoted to papers on the Permian– Triassic boundary crisis and Early Triassic biotic recovery. It is an outgrowth of the Symposium on Early Triassic Chronostratigraphy and Biotic Recovery that was held in Chaohu, China, on May 21st–23rd, 2005 under the auspices of IGCP Project 467 and attended by about 200 Earth scientists with a ...

Four volcanic-ash beds bracket the Early-Middle Triassic boundary, as defined by conodont biostratigraphy, in a stratigraphic section in south China. High-precision U-Pb dates of single zircons allow us to place the Early to Middle Triassic (Olenekian-Anisian) boundary at 247.2 Ma. Magnetic-reversal stratigraphy allows global correlation. The new dates constrain the Early Triassic interval char...

Carbon isotopic studies from marine organic matter of the Permian-Triassic Maitai Group, New Zealand, reveal a significant 5Corg shift toward more negative values within the Little Ben Sandstone Formation. These isotopic data chemostratigraphically define the previously debated position of the Permian-Triassic boundary in the Maitai Group. The Permian-Triassic record of the Maitai Group is also...

This field guide is intended to familiarize participants of IGCP 458 with the aspects of the Newark and Hartford rift basins relevant to the non-marine Triassic-Jurassic boundary and its larger context. We will visit 27 stops that illustrate these the basins' range of sedimentary and igneous environments and paleobiological assemblages, focusing on their significance to the understanding of glo...

The Rochechourt impact structure in south-central France, with maximum diameter of 40–50 km, has previously been dated to within 1% uncertainty of the Triassic– Jurassic boundary, at which time ~30% of global genera became extinct. To evaluate the temporal relationship between the impact and the Triassic–Jurassic boundary at high precision, we have re-examined the structure’s age using multicol...

The discovery of the first definitively correlated earliest Jurassic (200 million years before present) tetrapod assemblage (Fundy basin, Newark Supergroup, Nova Scotia) allows reevaluation of the duration of the Triassic-Jurassic tetrapod extinction event. Present are tritheledont and mammal-like reptiles, prosauropod, theropod, and ornithischian dinosaurs, protosuchian and sphenosuchian croco...

Stable carbon isotopic analyses of organic carbon (d13C) in individual paleosol profiles from Permian–Triassic sequences of Antarctica reveal systematic isotopic variations with profile depth. These variations are in many cases analogous to those in modern soils, which are functions of redox conditions, soil development, and degree and type of microbial decay. In modern soils, these isotopic de...