Borrowing a term that has become essential in personal development manuals, we could say that life is particularly “resilient”.
None of the five major crises that have profoundly affected life over the past 500 million years have prevented it from finding a new path to reinvent itself.
If this is a well-established fact, scientists had perhaps still underestimated the speed with which the living could be reborn from its ashes.
To discover
These 24 hours that killed the dinosaurs: the incredible tale of a cataclysm
The discovery in China of an "exceptionally preserved deposit" (also called Lagerstätte) thus shows today that only one million years after the massive Permian-Triassic extinction, which saw the disappearance of nearly 90% of the marine species 252 million years ago, new complex and richly diversified ecosystems had already succeeded in establishing themselves.
If the first description of this “biota of Guiyang” has the honors of the journal
Science
this week, it is because its richness…
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