1,783,992 views
8,913 likes
For about a million years, it rained across nearly the entire supercontinent. Lake beds filled with sediment that should have taken far longer to accumulate. Coral reefs collapsed. Whole groups of reptiles that had dominated the land for millions of years thinned out and disappeared.
What geologists later found in Triassic rock layers, from the Italian Alps to the deserts of the American Southwest, was the same wet interval showing up in the same window of time. It became known as the Carnian Pluvial Episode, and it sits directly beneath the point where dinosaurs stop being a minor part of the fossil record and start being the whole story.
