The end-Triassic mass extinction

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The extinction at the Triassic–Jurassic boundary, coinciding within the resolution of high-precision dating with the main eruptive pulses of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province as Pangaea began to rift. Conodonts disappear entirely, ammonoids are severely reduced, reef systems collapse again, and on land the crurotarsan archosaurs — the crocodile-line reptiles that had been the dominant large land predators through the Triassic — are almost eliminated. The consequence is the clearest single case in the record of an extinction changing what the world looks like afterwards: dinosaurs had existed for tens of millions of years as one group among several, and it is only after this event that they become the dominant large terrestrial animals. The boundary interval carries carbon-isotope excursions consistent with rapid additions of isotopically light carbon, which is the same signature the end-Permian and the Palaeocene–Eocene warming events show.

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