Desolation

An illustration I made for the awesome professor Erin Saupe for her lab's newly released research paper.

They studied the selectivity of mass extinction when caused by climate change, looking at extinction events over the past 485 million years. They found that among hard-shelled marine animals, some traits make taxa more prone to extinction: small body size, small range size, narrow thermal tolerance and extreme temperature preferences. However, the magnitude of change is important. The main conclusion is a warning: "our results suggest that taxa previously identified as extinction resistant may still succumb to extinction if the magnitude of climate change is great enough."

You can see the paper here (unfortunately not open access): www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

My illustration features one of the times when a rapid warming caused widespread extinctions of marine taxa: the end-Triassic mass extinction about 201 million years ago. On the left side is a fairly generalized Late Triassic (Norian-Rhaetian) low latitude reef ecosystem, plentiful with corals and sponges, ammonites and conodonts, echinoderms and crinoids. On the right hand side, the same ecosystem in the earliest Jurassic, after a global heating event, widespread oceanic oxygen deficit and a wild blooming of purple bacteria, causing the collapse of most reef ecosystems and the extinction of all conodonts, as well as many groups of invertebrates.