Rendered sterile by radiation Colin Harris/era-images/Alamy Stock Photo
We may have misunderstood the mother of all extinctions. The gargantuan Permian extinction has been blamed on massive volcanic eruptions that killed swathes of organisms, but the eruptions may instead have had an insidious effect: sterilisation. Organisms may not have been killed outright, but if they could not reproduce their species were still doomed.
Almost all complex life died 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian period. The causes have long been debated.
About a decade ago geologists began noticing something odd about fossil pollen from the time. An…
