Date:
March 31, 2014
Source:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Summary:
Methane-producing microbes may be responsible for the largest mass extinction
in Earth's history. Fossil remains show that sometime around 252 million years
ago, about 90 percent of all species on Earth were suddenly wiped out -- by far
the largest of this planet's five known mass extinctions. It turns out that
Methanosarcina had acquired a particularly fast means of making methane, and
the team's detailed mapping of the organism's history now shows that this
transfer happened at about the time of the end-Permian extinction.
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