Deadliest mass extinction - before dinosaurs !

During childhood, deadly dinosaurs with their big jaws and violent maneuvours easily jolted me out of my sleep. As I grew up, I began to appreciate Steven Spielberg's epic pull-out in bringing Dinosaurs, the lost giants into popular media. If you judge by the sheer popularity, award for most famous mass extinction would be given to 'dinosaur extinction event'.

But this was one of the many mass extinction events which happened on our planet.  Big five as it is called, are five broad extinction events. The event in which big dinosaur got extinct happened around 66 million years ago. But this was not the biggest extinction event on our planet. That would be Permian-triassic extinction event which took place around 252 million years ago. Almost 96% of all the species were wiped out from the face of earth. Imagine those species which took million of years to evolve and specialise to their niche, then they were lost, gone in the geological blink of an eye.

Trilobites were one of the victims in this extinction event.

Life evolves and adapts to its environment, a sudden extinction event looks heartbreaking but it provides opportunity to evolutionary underdogs to fill those vacant ecosystems. Thatswhy we have evolved. The extinction of deadly dinosaurs provided a huge window of opportunity to our mammalian ancestors. Geologically continents are not constant, they move around. Continents join  and split and they again join in the endless cycle. Upon it and in oceans endless number of species grow and they too become extinct. As if it is a cosmic ticket in space and time to each species. The clocks keeps on ticking and when the time comes the species is doomed. I feel awed by the endless ecosystems which are locked in fossils, to peep in and imagine those worlds which existed right here millions of years ago. The ecosystems which would evolve in future. Its a humbling reality, and reinforces the belief that we are not the owners of this planet, we are mere passengers on this space ship, planet earth.