Permian

That's the Mesozoic Age of Dinosaurs.

Goes down into that band you see, the cream-colored, that's probably the phosphoria formation of the Permian.

So that's Paleozoic rock, so a huge mass extinction right there.

on earth biggest one known in earth history was the end permian kind of thing and below that is all the paleozoic sequence so 540 million years ago till the end of to a permian and i don't know the age of that up top my head right now so everything we're seeing here is all paleozoic And that's going to end up into the Archean.

So much is preserved by the cold.

In some strange way, there were reptilian versions of things which later appeared as mammals, and these were abroad in the pre-dinosaur age, the Permian and so on.

So there actually was a reptile dog called Procynosuchus.

Extremely dog-like.

On the other hand, it's a reptile.

I got a copy of one from the Berlin Museum.

So where did it wind up? Probably in Texas it came from the Permian Basin, which is where the Permian era is named from, and that is the deposit with these creatures in it.

Of course, that's also the terminus when almost all life on the planet died out.

And the way that the geologists could tell around the world, looking at different rocks, that they were dealing with the same rocks, is that there are characteristic fossils found in them that disappeared all over the world at a certain time.

And so, for example, the disappearance, the trilobites appear in the Cambrian and they disappear at the end of the Permian.

Any rock in the world that you see that has a trilobite in it is going to be in the Paleozoic.

The ammonites, you'll see in a few minutes, appear and disappear a number of times, but they finally disappear at the end of the Cretaceous.

So they appear in the early Carboniferous and they undergo continuing evolution up to the present day.

So they keep getting diversifying and becoming more sophisticated, but there are recognizable gymnosperms 350 million years ago.

And when the flowering plants evolve, it depends on whether you're looking at molecules or fossils, the molecules suggest that it might be as old as Carboniferous Permian Triassic, that is 200 to 300 million years ago.

Some people don't believe that.

And now the Paleozoic era has several periods.

The most famous are the bookends, the Cambrian and the Permian.

But near the end, right before the Permian, there was a period where some truly weird shit happened.

And that's the Carboniferous Period.

And it started on this day, 359 million years ago.

not.

For the entire Carboniferous period, the Earth was technically in an ice age.

It starts in the period before, the late Devonian, and it continues the whole time until it finally ends in the middle to late Permian.

Of course though, that said, there was also the radical option of not fighting getting eaten, but rather giving into it.

as we are aware certain types of medulla sales that possessed seeds that were covered by extremely large and fleshy tissue riling the size of avocados and this was perhaps an adaptation to incentivize an animal to actually eat the seed and therefore disperse it a tactic which would become much more common later down the road Now, for basically the entirety of the Carboniferous, these swampy forests were the norm, and even in the earlier parts of the Permian, such forests still existed.

However, that said, the nature of vegetation, no pun intended, started to shift towards the middle Permian.

A drier climate, lower sea levels, and more arid interiors of Pangea forced a change in forests and plants.

In places that were still moist, like certain parts of China, coal swamps persisted.

Yes, you've probably heard of this one, as they are widely present even now.

Conifers are cone-bearing trees that also evolved needle-like leaves that are extremely thin and coated in a thick, waxy material known as a cuticle.

And it's this reduced surface area and waxy exterior that allowed conifers to conserve their water better and survive in drier climates, which in turn allowed them to spread rapidly, with the group becoming the dominant player in the Permian's second half alongside something else known as Glossopteris.

But some researchers have their doubts.

Dimetrodon lived in the early part of Earth's Permian period, which lasted from around 298 to 251 million years ago.

And one of its closest relatives from around the same time was another carnivore with a similar build overall, except it lacked a massive sail on its back.

So why would one of these creatures need a solar panel if the other got along fine without it? Sexual selection could be the X factor here.

It probably gets lumped in there because of toy companies mislabeling it in playsets and bags of plastic figurines.

And Hollywood is no help.

Fantasia and The Land Before Time both have this Permian synapsid brushing shoulders with actual dinosaurs.

Again, Dimetrodon died out tens of millions of years before the first dinosaurs even showed up.

And so basically this allows you to plot and estimate a curve.

And it looks like there was massive withdrawal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, from the Ordovician through the Permian, right here.

And then there was a reinjection here, going into the Triassic.

And when we come to the Permian mass extinction I want you to remember this dip here, and this reinjection.

And then there's been a more gradual withdrawal down to the current level.

The Earth was much more of a greenhouse in the past than it is today.

This is about 600 million years, and there's evidence for one which is deeper at about a billion years.

So this is an ice age, this is an ice age.

They evolved leaves that hang vertically with a tough outer coating, reducing water loss by evaporation.

Unlike many rainforest trees, eucalyptus could thrive in thin, dry soils because they have deep vertical roots that could reach water by growing down through cracks in the eroding phyllite and shale hills formed from uplifted Permian Age seafloor, the bedrock across much of Brisbane.

But it was the partnerships Eucalyptus developed that ensured their success, first with termites, who surprisingly were not this tree's natural enemies, as you might assume.

Termites eat the dead heartwood inside eucalypt trunks and branches, but leave the living growing outer tissue, so that over hundreds of years the trunk and limbs become largely hollow.