Simple Tip To Survive Mass Extinction: Live Fast, Die Young

There is a special technique evolved by nature to survive a mass extinction. Die young!! Scientists find that survivors of mass extinction events had a few things in common----they lived fast and died young in order to live through extinction.

There was a shattering eruption when Siberian volcanoes exploded about 250 million years ago. It made the earth face the "greatest mass extinction event of all time." It propelled billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, which altered the earth's climate.

Experts in their latest study  tried to probe what helped only some species to survive. The genus Lystrosaurus managed to live through the Permo-Triassic extinction and even dominated global ecosystems for millions of years during the post-extinction recovery era.

"Therapsid fossils like Lystrosaurus are important because they teach us about the resilience of our own extinct relatives in the face of extinction, and provide clues as to which traits conferred success on lineages during this turbulent time," said Adam Huttenlocker, one of the paper's authors. "Lystrosaurus was particularly prolific, making it possible to build a large dataset and to sacrifice some specimens for histology to study the growth patterns recorded in its bones."

Before the extinction event, it looked like a pygmy hippo, but after the event, it was as big as a dog, mainly due to the lifespan that changed. Before the event, it survived 13 to 14 years but later, it lived to be 2 to 3 years old. It obviously started breeding young!

The Atlantic cod too has altered due to "overfishing". Experts can see that the fish are breeding younger and getting smaller.

"Although it's hard to see the effects in our daily lives, there is substantial evidence that we are the middle of a sixth mass extinction right now," Huttenlocker said. "It has been predicted that half of mammal species could become extinct by the end of the next century if present patterns continue; that's more than 1,000 times greater than previous estimates of natural extinctions, a trend not seen since the End-Permian or End-Cretaceous extinctions."

The findings were published in the April 2016 edition of the journal Scientific Reports.