Christian Sidor, UW Biology professor and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the UW Burke Museum, was featured in a UW News article on research identifying the animals that thrived in southern Pangea — the planet’s single supercontinent at the time — just before the so-called “Great Dying” wiped out about 70% of terrestrial species, and an even larger fraction of marine ones.
Excerpt from UW News article:
An international team of paleontologists has spent more than 15 years excavating and studying fossils from Africa to expand our understanding of the Permian, a period of Earth’s history that began 299 million years ago and ended 252 million years ago with our planet’s largest and most devastating mass extinction. Led by researchers at the University of Washington and the Field Museum of Natural History, the team is identifying the animals that thrived in southern Pangea — the planet’s single supercontinent at the time — just before the so-called “Great Dying” wiped out about 70% of terrestrial species, and an even larger fraction of marine ones.
“This mass extinction was nothing short of a cataclysm for life on Earth, and changed the course of evolution,” said Christian Sidor, a UW professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the UW Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture. “But we lack a comprehensive view of which species survived, which didn’t, and why. The fossils we have collected in Tanzania and Zambia will give us a more global perspective on this unprecedented period in our planet’s natural history.”
Sidor and Kenneth Angielczyk, curator of paleomammalogy at the Field Museum, are co-editors of a 14-article series published Aug. 7 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology featuring the team’s recent discoveries about the myriad of animals that made Permian Africa their home. These include saber-toothed predators, burrowing foragers and a large, salamander-like creature.
All these finds were excavated in three basins across southern Africa: the Ruhuhu Basin in southern Tanzania, the Luangwa Basin in eastern Zambia and the Mid-Zambezi Basin in southern Zambia. Most were discovered by team members on multiple, month-long excavation trips to the region over the past 17 years. Others were analyses of specimens dug up decades prior that had been stored in museum collections.
“These parts of Zambia and Tanzania contain absolutely beautiful fossils from the Permian,” said Sidor. “They are giving us an unprecedented view of life on land leading up to the mass extinction.”
Read the full article in UW News.