Overview
- A peer-reviewed paper in Science led by Aubrey J. Roberts reports more than 30,000 vertebrate fossils from the Grippia Bonebed in Svalbard dated to roughly 249 million years ago.
- Systematic grid collection across 36 square meters recovered over 800 kilograms of material from a dense, short-lived deposit, enabling a finely resolved snapshot of an Early Triassic ocean community.
- Taxonomic and diversity analyses reveal a multi-level food web including apex-predator ichthyosaurs, smaller ichthyopterygians, durophagous ichthyosauriforms, semi-aquatic archosauromorphs, euryhaline temnospondyls, bony fish and sharks.
- The findings indicate marine vertebrate ecosystems diversified within about three million years of the end-Permian mass extinction, challenging the long-standing view of an eight-million-year recovery.
- A computer-based global comparison highlights the assemblage as among the most species-rich of its time and suggests sea-going tetrapod lineages may have originated earlier than previously thought.