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Global Warming May Have Preserved Fossil

Dramatic global warming episodes occurred in the prehistoric period killing millions of species. This may provide nerve-racking information to the environmentalists to let them predict the future, but, for the historians the phenomenon gifted them with vast treasure of fossils. Massive atmospheric pollution involving carbon dioxide and methane that resulted in the prehistoric global warming could have created and preserved “mass kills” of wildlife, according to a University of Oregon study presented at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting. The work involved a worldwide compilation of thousands of exceptionally well preserved fossil assemblages of fish, crustaceans, insects, starfish and other life forms. There are only about 41 episodes of exceptional preservation from the last 500 million years, and each episode is widely distributed around the world. The species are thought to have been preserved in environments that were unusually low in oxygen, highly saline, very cold, or extremely dry.

Via: Science Daily

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