the Great Dying is the colloquial name for the End-Permian mass extinction event, which separates the Permian from the Triassic in the geological record.
and it’s called that for a reason, because the Great Dying killed, no joke, 90% of all animals on planet Earth in the worst mass extinction of all time! the Earth before the Great Dying was an alien land full of crocodile relatives, mammal ancestors, and more weird fish than you could shake a reasonably-sized stick at.
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the world after the Great Dying was a blasted hellscape, with few survivors either in the sea or on land.
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one of those land-bound survivors was the ancestor of all mammals, and another was the first of the dinosaurs! the next geologic age, the Triassic, would see the rise of dinosaurs and pterosaurs and even seagoing ichthyosaurs to replace the multitude of lineages that fell during the Great Dying.
but what caused this chaotic event?
the death of a supercontinent, no joke.
Pangea was very much a thing at the time, but plate tectonics were starting to literally rip it apart at the seams. and when the seams split, a volcanic hellstorm was unleashed that hurled lava MILES into the air and covered the land in lava beds over a mile thick, releasing gigantic stores of carbon dioxide that dwarf the maximum amount humans could ever release by an order of magnitude! and also poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas. that will be important later.
so what happened next was runaway global warming that rapidly turned the entire planet except for the poles completely uninhabitable. the ocean got so warm that it was as hot as a hot tub at the equator, which made the water unable to hold dissolved gases and sent the breathable oxygen levels in the ocean plummeting worldwide, suffocating basically everything in it. the land was covered in a haze of highly toxic gas and punishing heat that poisoned and baked animals alive, while the hot ocean waters may have fueled hurricanes the size of entire continents that ravaged both earth and sea down to the bedrock!
the whole fucking planet looked more like Venus than anything we’d recognize today.
so basically, this was the lowest point of animal life on Earth. it took many millions of years for our planet to recover, and we all should be thankful that, whatever humanity unleashes in the future, at least it won’t be as bad as the Great Dying.
I know this is bordering on speculative sci fi daydreaming here, but what if life DID thrive for those many millions of "largely uninhabitable" years, just not life that fossilized well?? how would we ever even know if this was just an amazing era of soft bodied extremophiles? Weird, weird little worms and jellies and who knows what else blooming across the volcanic, poisonous earth and boiling acidic lakes, only to experience its own secret apocalypse.
Specialized animals are thriving even now in boiling hot, deadly poisonous caverns and hot springs that haven't existed for nearly as long as some of these blasted hellscapes stuck around!
actually, there was so much of one specific soft-bodied extremophile kicking around during this period of Earth's history that we do actually have fossil evidence of it in the form of very specific pigment deposits that are found in rock layers worldwide!
the culprits? green sulfur bacteria.
like you can find in the hot pools at modern-day Yellowstone.
this shit LOVES extreme temperatures and hydrogen sulfide, so this was basically the best thing that ever happened to this particular bacteria personally in the entire history of life on Earth! there was probably more green sulfur bacteria during the Great Dying by sheer biomass than in all of the following ages put together. just endless fields of bright green slime that stank like rotten eggs.
and after a few million years, once the volcanic rifts had closed up, they actually pulled all the poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas right out of the atmosphere and restarted the photosynthesis cycle, making them a huge part in getting the planet habitable again! so we really owe them a lot, if you think about it.
so go, I don't know, find some green sulfur bacteria in your local bog and maybe high-five it gently? VERY gently.
definitely wear gloves.
