The Worst of Times: How Life on Earth Survived Eighty Million Years of Extinctions
By Paul B. Wignall
About 250 million years ago, things got very bad indeed. The sheer scale of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction boggles the mind: More than 90 percent of life on Earth was wiped out. And yet, the event set the stage for an explosion of new species. In this scholarly but accessible analysis, geologist Wignall explores the perfect storm of cataclysms, plate tectonics and other forces that led to “The Great Dying” — and the rebound of life in its aftermath.
