Talk:Permian

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For a student, it is very nice to learn the faunal stages in various names. Thanks.

Better check the external links for updates. Are the faunal stages in this entry the most current ones, you geology heads?Wetman 02:45, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Ah, the Late Permian, my current favorite geological period! Bored with dinosaurs? Check out the Permian. Someday I'm going to write an article here about it. The animal life then wasn't as big or as spectacular as in the Mesozoic, but it was much more grotesque. The dominant land predators were cat-to-lion-sized therapsid 'reptiles' sporting huge saber fangs, hand-like feet, a scary sprawling posture from which they could probably rise to an even more scary scrambling run as they came after you. These were the gorgonopsians and the cynognaths. Not only that, but these animals were probably warm-blooded, probably had color vision, and they lived during the several ice ages, so you can visualize them sporting colorful fur coats with manes, frills, 'snowshoes,' the whole works. Herbivores were even weirder, with antlers, beaks, tusks and horns, yow! The landscape must have been eerie with no grass to control erosion, cycads covered with snow, ferns the size of trees. Tropical jungles, snow-capped mountains, lagoons, deserts, glaciers! Makes you wonder why the Late Permian is so neglected by paleontological artists. I'm only an amateur, but I hope to do something about this someday, if I live long enough. Also: the map of Gondwananaland sure looks like Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Contents

[edit] "Unstable" ecosystem?

"...but the ecosystem was still comparativly unstable. " Unstable ecosystems do not endure. A better paleoecologist than I should vet this statement and make sense out of it. --Wetman 22:06, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Subdivisions

I changed this to reflect ICS terminology. There is no such thing, formally, as Early or Late Permian. --Geologyguy 15:29, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

[1] doesn't seem to agree with you Fornadan (t) 16:38, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
Certainly there will be different versions and usages. Put it back if you want, I won't argue (not too big a deal)... but the ICS scale I have does not use them. Cheers Geologyguy 21:24, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ambiguous sentence

Does anyone know what the sentence:

On an individual level, perhaps as many as 99.5% of separate organisms died as a result of the event.[citation needed]

is supposed to mean? Does it mean 'individual organisms'? Is so, I would imagine that 100% of individuals alive at that time are now dead. The extinction 'event' could well have taken place over a period of millions of years, couldn't it? Ashmoo 03:18, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Pretty unclear, isn't it? I'd guess it means that for a given species, 99.5% of the members (individual animals) of that species died, even when the entire species did not go extinct. But, since there is no reliable source, and it is confusing, I would vote to remove the line. Shall we see if others agree? Cheers Geologyguy 03:48, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Why not substitute several sourced quotes giving a clear and forcefulimpression of the extent of the damage? I'll add a Notes section; <ref></ref> html will drop the name, title, date, page down into the Notes. --Wetman 10:47, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
"perhaps as many as 99.5% of separate organisms died" probably means "the total number of organisms was reduced to 0.5% of the pre-extinction level". The alternative meaning "99.5% died without leaving descendants" is probably useless because infant mortality rates among marine invertebrates are huge ene in normal conditions. We need to find some refs to clarify the meaning. Check those used in Permian–Triassic extinction event. Philcha (talk) 12:29, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
PS I suspect "organisms" means "multi-celled organisms", as it would be hard to count the pre- and post-extinction numbers of bacteria, especially the extremophiles living deep under the Earth's surface. Philcha (talk) 12:32, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] why the name?

There doesn't seem to be any discussion of why this period is named "Permian". I was taught that is was named so because many fossils from this period are found in the Texas "Permian Basin", but the article on the basin claims it is named after the Permian period. I have a hard time believing anything here in Texas is named after a scientific concept. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Robcat2075 (talk • contribs) 03:46, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

The name is derived from the Russian city of Perm, apparently. Says so on the page about Perm. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 168.103.49.123 (talk) 05:14, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sahara Desert?

From Permian-Triassic extinction event, 6th para
"For perspective, a 10-degree increase today would turn southern England into the Sahara Desert".
Does anyone know of a citation for this one? or is this personal conjecture? Maybe it would turn southern England into a tropical paradise instead?
Methinks remove it... Sansumaria (talk) 16:01, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm noticing that a lot of these articles contain original research with invented commentary. It's like when Ronald Reagan said "trees produce more pollution than do cars." Funny, but not supported by anything. OrangeMarlin Talk• Contributions 16:47, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Insects

The section on insects in this article is rather long. A lot of the information there is not about the Permain Period but the earlier Devonian and Carboniferous. It would be better to remove it from this article and put it in the aticles about these periods. Another problem is that the referenced aricle by Wakeling & Ellington is much more explicit about the ancestors of dragonflies than wikipedia:

Dragonfly ancestors, the Protodonata, are amongst the earliest winged insect fossils, and the dragonfly mode of flight has persisted for 300 million years (Wootton, 1974; May, 1982). The evolution of the more modern, neopteran, insects has superseded the odonates, and their modern mode of flight with one functional pair of wings can be considered to be evolutionarily more advanced. (Wakeling & Ellington, 1996)

I would suggest that at least the name Protodonata and the age 300 Ma have to be used in the text (probably at Carboniferous); else the sentence remains rather vague and only confuses. Woodwalker (talk) 09:19, 29 January 2008 (UTC)