Thomas Holm Scharling

Editor’s summary The end-Permian extinction was the largest of Earth’s mass extinctions, with marine environments especially affected. Although it is now understood that the recovery of marine invertebrates after this extinction was rapid, the story for vertebrates has been less clear. Roberts et al. describe a bone bed from the Svalbard archipelago showing that a large and diverse number of marine vertebrates was present just a few million years after the event.