‘Global warming mirrors Earth’s largest extinction event’

The ‘Great Dying’: Dimetrodon gigas and Eryops megacephalus from the early Permian period in North America. Creatures such as these would have been part of the era when volcanoes pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – much as we are doing now. — Wikimedia Commons

MORE than two-thirds of life on earth died off some 252 million years ago, in the largest mass extinction event in Earth’s history.

Researchers have long suspected that volcanic eruptions triggered “the Great Dying”, as the end of the Permian geologic period is sometimes called, but exactly how so many creatures died has been something of a mystery.