I'm John Batsch with my colleague and friend David Livingston,

Dr Space of the Space Show, and we're traveling in time,

251, 250 million years ago, the end of the Permian, and we're looking for a murderer,

something killed the life that existed.

There were not T-Rexus, but there were versions of T-Rexus, meat eaters.

There were all kinds of creatures that we associate with, oh, I don't know, science fiction, you know,

dinosaurs run the earth, and they were all wiped out

along with the food that source that they use not just meat but all the vegetation

and then the sea life was wiped out as well.

A little bitty creatures,

something that looks like the Cambrian explosion

existing at the bottom of the sea.

Two seas, Tethys and Panaglossia.

Why? All right. now here's an inconsistency that the volcanoes can't explain.

As I understand it, Dr. Forenham, the land animals died first and then the sea animals. How do volcanoes explain that?

Yeah with a great deal of difficulty because as we know ultimately the volcano was responsible but a lot of this

extinction actually happened quite early on in this eruption the actual bulk of

that warmth that eventually occurs

actually doesn't actually kill off this start off this sort of

extinction event especially on land and we're looking at roughly a sort of

you know 15 16 17,000 year difference between the massive amount of

terrestrial extinction that occurs on land and then it doesn't really start to occur in the oceans

...