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The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Reef | Life and Death on Pangea
Season 9
Episode 3
Life in the Middle Permian Period flourished. Gigantic reef complexes stretched for hundreds of kilometers in what’s now the Texas desert, while strange mammal-relatives and huge reptiles thrived on land. But this epoch ends in a crushing extinction.
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7:54
Around 300 million years ago sails were all the rage, but we're still not sure what they were for.
10:44
During the Permian Period many tetrapods, or four-limbed vertebrates, took to life in the trees.
9:29
For millions of years after the Great Dying microbes ruled the Earth.
26:06
Life begins to rebound after the destruction of the mass extinction ending the Permian Period.
25:37
An apocalypse ended the Permian Period 252 million years ago, wiping out more than 80% of species.
25:37
The first saber-teeth and tusks evolve in the Late Permian and our ancestors, the cynodonts, appear.
25:37
The first herbivorous vertebrates evolve on the side of the amniote family tree leading to mammals.
25:37
Seed plants and amniotes adapt to dry climates, helping them thrive on Pangea in the Permian Period.
9:11
How did Homotherium evolve to be so successful? The answer may lie in the rise of the Tibetan plate.
10:16
The mystery of what non-flying dinosaurs were doing with their feathered wings has a new hypothesis.
11:45
What did ancient people once know about these bizarre megafauna that we’ve since forgotten?