world through time: able to stop at each period

connections to climate and geography

While animals were undergoing a change so were plants, with xerophyletic (dry-adapted) species of ferns, seed-ferns, conifers and ginkgos coming into prominence. The Glossopteris flora dominates in Gondwanaland. These new plants mark the transition between the Paleophytic (the old spore-bearing moisture loving coal swamp plants) and the Mesophytic (gymnospermous) era of plant evolution. Significantly, whereas animal life has its big transition at the very end of the Permian, plant life switches over to a more modern flora some ten to twenty million years previous. The same pattern is seen in in the late Mesozoic era, where modern flowering plants appear long before the extinction of the dinosaurs and their contemporaries.

"Life on much of the supercontinent Pangea resembled central Asia today: Large inland areas, far from moderating oceans, suffered baking summers and bitter winters. At tropical and subtropical latitudes, summer monsoon rains bathed the continent's east coast. Those conjectures come from a computer model that uses coastlines and topography-plus a few laws of physics, like the equations for air movements and heat transport-to predict the climate 250 million years ago. The idealized, squared-off coastline of this map simplified the calculations done in 1993 by Chicago's Alfred Ziegler and John Kutzbach of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (illustration by Allen Carroll). Rainfall and temperature data determine the biome regions where evolution unfolded, from tundra to tropics. Wind patterns can predict ocean currents like the upwellings that fostered plankton, a clue to today's oil deposits. And comparisons to the actual climate and biome, deduced from fossil and geologic evidence, improve the computer model-refining predictions of future climate change, like global warming."

Paleozoic vascular flora, which appeared in the Middle Ordovician epoch, died out quite a few millions of years before the end of the Paleozoic, in the Kungurian or earlier. In the Guadalupian, the gymnosperm-dominated Mesophytic flora emerges (although Mesophytic type plants go back to the Carboniferous, just as some Paleophytic plants survive even to this day), and this flourishes right up until the middle and later Cretaceous.

discusses how although there was a faunal "dead zone" at the permo-triassic boundary, pollen and spore samples show life.

has graph used in other presentation

At the beginning of the Permian Period, ferns and seed-ferns were the dominant plant life. As the climate grew drier, these simpler plants were replaced by more complex plants, such as conifers and ginkgoes.

Some significant groups of plants evolved during the Permian in the climatic conditions which became progressively drier; these being the Bennettites, Cycads, Ginkgos and Glossopterids.

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The flora the researchers discovered mainly consisted of leaf debris and petrified tree stumps belonging to the Dadoxylon genus. For Bourquin, “these conifer-like plants point to well-drained environments in Luang Prabang in the Permian.”

For instance, in what climate–doubtless hot and humid–and in which environments did the local flora and fauna live in the Upper Permian? What connections were there between the Indochina and Eurasian plates? Do the Luang Prabang fauna and flora show any resemblance to those discovered in other Permian sites in France, Niger, Morocco, and other countries?

mid permian (270ma) maps