—Delayed biotic recovery from the end-Permian mass extinction has long been interpreted to result from environmental inhibition. Recently, evidence of more rapid recovery has begun to emerge, suggesting the role of environmental inhibition was previously overestimated. However, there have been few high-resolution taxonomic and ecological studies spanning the full Early and Middle Triassic recov...

—Mesozoic marine ecosystems were dominated by several clades of reptiles, including sauropterygians, ichthyosaurs, crocodylomorphs, turtles, and mosasaurs, that repeatedly invaded ocean ecosystems. Previous research has shown that marine reptiles achieved great taxonomic diversity in the Middle Triassic, as they broadly diversified into many feeding modes in the aftermath of the Permo-Triassic ...

rocks of the Stuhuni and King Salmon Groups; a pre-.Middlm: Triassic unconformity is found througbmt the North American Cordillera (Read and Okulitch, 1977, Siberling, 1973:. In the Stikine Terrane, late Triassic volcanic rocks ar: dominantly fragmental andcommonly alkalic. Based on bul:: rock chemistry, both extensional, ba:k-arc, and Fore-ar: tectonic settings have been suggested tor these r...

The evolutionary radiation of dinosaurs in the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic was a pivotal event in the Earth's history but is poorly understood, as previous studies have focused on vague driving mechanisms and have not untangled different macroevolutionary components (origination, diversity, abundance and disparity). We calculate the morphological disparity (morphospace occupation) of dinos...

In the wake of the end-Permian mass extinction, the Early Triassic (~251.9 to 247 million years ago) is portrayed as an environmentally unstable interval characterized by several biotic crises and heavily depauperate marine benthic ecosystems. We describe a new fossil assemblage-the Paris Biota-from the earliest Spathian (middle Olenekian, ~250.6 million years ago) of the Bear Lake area, southe...

The Rosário do Sul Group is one of the better-known tetrapod-bearing continental deposits of Triassic age. It crops out in central Rio Grande do Sul, south Brazil, and has yielded a fauna of more than 40 valid species, including temnospondyl, procolophonoideans, dicynodonts, cynodonts, sphenodontian, rhynchosaurs, and archosaurs. Its fossil record is herein briefly assessed, along with the stra...

Early Triassic animal body fossils and trace fossils are small relative to those in older and younger intervals. Size decreases sharply through the end-Permian extinction event and Permian/Triassic boundary, and the smallest sizes are encountered in the parvus and isarcica Zones of the earliest Induan. Animals appearing within these two zones are also exceedingly small, compared to younger cong...

The Rochechourt impact structure in south-central France, with maximum diameter of 40–50 km, has previously been dated to within 1% uncertainty of the Triassic– Jurassic boundary, at which time ~30% of global genera became extinct. To evaluate the temporal relationship between the impact and the Triassic–Jurassic boundary at high precision, we have re-examined the structure’s age using multicol...

Secondary marine adaptation is a major pattern in amniote evolution, accompanied by specific bone histological adaptations. In the aftermath of the end-Permian extinction, diverse marine reptiles evolved early in the Triassic. Plesiosauria is the most diverse and one of the longest-lived clades of marine reptiles, but its bone histology is least known among the major marine amniote clades. Ples...

Although the group played an important role in the evolution of Late Mesozoic terrestrial ecosystems, the early evolutionary history of the ornithischian dinosaurs remains poorly understood. Here, we report on a new primitive ornithischian, Eocursor parvus gen. et sp. nov. from the Late Triassic (?Norian) Lower Elliot Formation of South Africa. Eocursor is known from a single specimen comprisin...