The Worst of Times: How Life on Earth Survived Eighty Million Years of Extinctions. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Worst of Times: How Life on Earth Survived Eighty Million Years of Extinctions

Drawing on the latest discoveries as well as his own firsthand experiences conducting field expeditions to remote corners of the world, Paul Wignall reveals what scientists are only now beginning to understand about the most prolonged and calamitous period of environmental crisis in Earths history. He describes how a series of unprecedented extinction events swept across the planet in a span of eighty million years, rapidly killing marine and terrestrial life on a scale more devastating than the dinosaur extinctions that would come later. Wignall shows how these extinctions - some of which have only recently been discovered - all coincided with gigantic volcanic eruptions of basalt lavas that occurred when the worlds landmasses were united into a single vast expanse.

Paul B. Wignall is professor of paleoenvironments at the University of Leeds.