OBSERVING MIDDLE TRIASSIC RECOVERY INTERVALS

We live at a time of rapid environmental change, resulting largely from anthropogenic activities, and a concomitant, accelerating rate of habitat loss and species extinctions. Alarmingly we do not fully understand, and therefore cannot predict, the ultimate consequences of tampering with global diversity. Understanding how modern ecosystems might function in light of the modern biodiversity crisis is of global importance. Recent diversity studies in ancient communities present overall patterns of extinction and survival. However, to understand the driving mechanisms behind the existing global diversity patterns further, scientists need to investigate communities during past episodes of extinction and biotic recovery within an ecological context. Much of the postextinction paleoecological work focuses on the survival interval, the immediate time periods following the mass extinction. Analyses such as these provide integral details concerning the consequences of mass extinction; however, the effects of mass extinction extend beyond the survival phase. Recent research indicates that some genera experience survival without recovery after a mass extinction concluding that since many survivors do not participate in postrecovery diversification the effects of mass extinctions extend beyond the tallied losses and survivors at the crisis boundary. Despite these results, little attention has focused on the ecological patterns of the Middle Triassic recovery phase. Therefore, to gain a fuller understand of the long-term effects of end-Permian mass extinction, including the transitional period from the “Paleozoic” to the “Modern” fauna, it is imperative to document the recovery interval of the end-Permian mass extinction. Recent work in the Canadian Rockies and in the Western United States tests the hypothesis that the spatial and temporal patterns of the end-Permian mass extinction recovery interval are far more complex than simply refilling emptied ecological niches.