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Around 252 million years ago, 90 percent of all species on Earth were wiped out in an extinction event commonly called The Great Dying. Now, a team of MIT researchers from the U.S. and China might have the answer for the largest mass extinction our planet has ever seen
It wasn’t asteroids or volcanoes, but methane-producing microbes called Methanosarcina having sex — or rather, passing genetic material in a strange microbial form of sex.
Scientists believe that these microbes acquired a set of genes that allowed them to feed off the rich organic carbon deposits that have developed in the oceans. In doing so, the microbes spewed “prodigious amounts” of methane into the atmosphere, dramatically changing the climate and chemistry of the oceans — literally suffocating almost all other life forms on the planet. Read more...
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