What is the Permian-Triassic extinction event debate?
The Permian-Triassic is the biggest extinction in the geological record, so we need to try to understand it as best we can. One of our mechanisms by which we do that is to look for environmental proxies, organisms or chemical signatures that tell us about the conditions at the time. One of these is the fungal remains, these little spores that we find that absolutely blossomed as they approached the Permian-Triassic event. The debate is: are they fungal or are they algal? If they’re fungal then they tell us that the world’s forests declined and the fungus used this woody material, this food stock to absolutely proliferate and do extremely well. If they’re algal, it just means we had very swampy conditions at the end of the Permian. So it was very important as far as trying to understand the total ecosystem collapse that we work out what the origin of these remains were. If they were fungal it would support the theory that there was some kind of global disaster? Exactly … because we find
