Drilling predation on Permian brachiopods and bivalves from the Glass Mountains, West Texas

Although bored invertebrates have been described from every period of the Paleozoic, little information on the frequency and nature of Late Paleozoic drill holes exists. Our examination of the Permian silicified fossils, which were bulk collected by G.A. Cooper from the Glass Mountains of west Texas, revealed numerous drilled brachiopods and bivalve mollusks. Drill holes are perpendicular to the shell, smooth sided, sometimes beveled, and have other characteristics consistent with a predatory/parasitic origin. The frequency of drilling is significantly lower (p ≤ 0.05) for brachiopods (1.07%, n = 7597) than for bivalves (7.43%, n = 619). This study confirms that drilling predators and/or parasites were present in the Late Paleozoic. However, the drilling frequencies reported here—rarely exceeding 5%—are much lower than those reported for the Late Mesozoic and Cenozoic, which typically exceed 20%. The low Late Paleozoic frequencies are consistent with a majority of estimates reported previously for the older periods of the Paleozoic and suggest that the intensity of drilling predation/parasitism in marine benthic ecosystems remained low throughout the Paleozoic and did not increase until some time in the Mesozoic. Our data suggest that prey/host types with a higher nutritional return (bivalve mollusks) may have been preferentially selected for attack by predator(s)/parasites(s) already in the Permian

Recovery from the most profound mass extinction of all time

The end-Permian mass extinction, 251 million years (Myr) ago, was the most devastating ecological event of all time, and it was exacerbated by two earlier events at the beginning and end of the Guadalupian, 270 and 260 Myr ago. Ecosystems were destroyed worldwide, communities were restructured and organisms were left struggling to recover. Disaster taxa, such as Lystrosaurus, insinuated themselves into almost every corner of the sparsely populated landscape in the earliest Triassic, and a quick taxonomic recovery apparently occurred on a global scale. However, close study of ecosystem evolution shows that true ecological recovery was slower. After the end-Guadalupian event, faunas began rebuilding complex trophic structures and refilling guilds, but were hit again by the end-Permian event. Taxonomic diversity at the alpha (community) level did not recover to pre-extinction levels; it reached only a low plateau after each pulse and continued low into the Late Triassic. Our data showed that though there was an initial rise in cosmopolitanism after the extinction pulses, large drops subsequently occurred and, counter-intuitively, a surprisingly low level of cosmopolitanism was sustained through the Early and Middle Triassic