Mass Extinction Killed Certain Animals, and Now Scientists Know the Most Vulnerable

What kind of animals actually survive a mass extinction? You might be surprised. Scientists have taken a closer look at the big five mass extinctions and have learned a bit more about the types of animals who are most vulnerable to extinction.

"There is no real precedent for what's happening to our planet at the moment," said Peter Roopnarine, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We can't look into recent history and find this particular cocktail of accelerated climate change, habitat destruction and global extinction. We can, however, explore instances of extreme crises in the fossil record-looking far back in time to reconstruct what happened, and how ecosystems responded."

In this latest study, the researchers were interested in the factors that encouraged or impeded stability while ancient South African communities faced large-scale disturbances. They wondered whether the roles each species played in the broader ecosystem had more influence on stability than species richness and the number and strength of interactions among species.

The researchers used mathematical modeling in order to get down to the center of the problem. They generated several alternate food webs for each important period and then examined each to see how stable they might have been.

So what did they find? It turns out that small amniotes, which are reptiles and ancient mammal relatives, were most vulnerable during the early phase of this long-ago period of extinction.

"It's surprising that small amniotes were the species initially most at risk," said Roopnarine. "It doesn't fit with the terrestrial extinctions we see today, but it makes sense when you think about how different Earth looks after so much time and change. What I'm saying is that it was a bad time to be a rat. We think they can survive anything now, but during the Permian and Triassic, their ancient cousins played an unlucky role in the larger community."

The findings reveal a bit more about the relationships between these species, and show how these animals respond to mass extinctions.

The findings are published in the journal Science.

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