Talk:Permian–Triassic extinction event

Great Dying as a redirect?

The page top says ""Great Dying" redirects here. For the disease epidemics in the Americas brought by Europeans, see Native American disease and epidemics#European contact. There's a huge problem with that. If you go to the article Native American disease and epidemics#European contact it says nothing about the term "Great Dying." Zip! There should never be a redirect for a term that is not important enough to be mentioned several time in the article you are redirecting towards. It is very misleading to our readers. As it stands right now this redirect to European epidemics should be removed. Fyunck(click) (talk) 09:46, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

I agree and have deleted it. Dudley Miles (talk) 12:17, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

We'll see if it sticks. I removed it 2 days ago and was scolded by editor Hemiauchenia with them saying "You have obviously done no reading on this topic at all." Fyunck(click) (talk) 02:06, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

I note this has now been resolved with a disambiguation page that links to pages on the other meaning of 'Great Dying', with references to use of the term. Personally, I would have assumed the hatnote was there for a reason and any use outside Wikipedia might justify it. I can't see policy to discourage it at Wikipedia:DABLINKUG. --Cedders^tk 15:15, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Page size

The recent edit by Anteosaurus magnificus has increased the page size from 11,886 words to 12,799 words. Wikipedia:Article size recommends a maximum of 10,000 words. This is not a fixed limit, but the article could probably do with trimming by an expert as it most likely includes old edits covering research which has since been debunked. The page size guidance also suggests hiving off some sections into separate articles to improve readability. Dudley Miles (talk) 10:03, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't think hiving off sections would be viable for this article, because all of them are intertwined with one another and having multiple separate articles would be much more confusing. You can't discuss the terrestrial extinction without talking about the effect of organic matter influx on marine extinction, for example, or look at PTME euxinia separately from SLIP volcanism, ocean acidification, or ozone layer degradation.

The PTME was the most important and significant event of the Phanerozoic eon, and quite possibly the entire history of life, and it's also one of the most heavily researched, so it exceeding limits designed for a typical page is to be expected. The pages for World War I, the Eastern Front of World War II, and the Pacific Theatre of World War II, for example, are far larger in word count than the PTME page is because their significance is rivalled by few other historical events; the PTME is to geology and palaeontology what those events are to history in terms of exceptional importance.

That being said, I think some of the sections can be axed, particularly "Combination of causes", which is redundant since the sections for the various causes already discuss their relationships and intertwining with one another, and "Supercontinent Pangaea", since the formation of Pangaea took place 85 million years before the PTME and was completely irrelevant to it. I plan on trimming the introduction a bit as well to remove redundancy. Anteosaurus magnificus (talk) 23:01, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

It's long – I make it over 14 000 words – but I read it without noticing that, and it is proportionate to the over 400 welcome references. It would be some work to split off the main causes section, but it might be worth it. We could then just describe the dominant hypothesis, as mentioned by the comment below about Stanford page, and list other possible factors without discussion. --Cedders^tk 15:24, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Cause not 'unknown' according to Stanford site

The lead says that the precise cause is unknown, but according to this article from earth.stanford.edu, it "was caused by global warming that left ocean animals unable to breathe". The rest of the article goes into details about it. Mathglot (talk) 21:43, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Inconsistent species magnitudes

According to this article and Extinction event the P-T extinction resulted in

the extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species[12][13][14] and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species

While it is statistically conceivable for a higher proportion of small genera to disappear than species, it seems extraordinarily unlikely.

I'm guessing the article was edited to include a new estimate of marine species loss from Stanley (2016), which uses a more conservative methodology from widely-cited works from Sepkoski and Raup (88-96%). Stanley in fact provides two estimates for marine species, 85% and after further correction 81%; the 83% for genera is still from Sepkoski; Stanley gives a 'new estimate of ∼62% provided here for terminal Permian extinction at the genus level'. I don't have the older sources [12] and [13] but they were published before Stanley. Even those published since like the Stanford page mentioned above (96%) use the earlier estimates; Corso et al (2022) which cites Stanley only includes its estimate as a lower bound of '81–94%'. 'Raup calculated that 52% of families' went extinct.

So should we a) choose one consistent source, b) like Corso et al acknowledge a range, or c) start with the Raup figures and acknowledge '88-96% of marine species (refs 12,13) ... a newer methodology suggests extinction of only 81% of marine species (ref Stanley)'? I would favour b, adding Corso as a reference, but would of course be interested in an expert view. --Cedders^tk 15:03, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Article name

Hey folks. Recently this article was renamed, without prior discussion, from "Permian–Triassic extinction event" to "Permian–Triassic extinction". You can see that here. I think it should be put back the way it was. As discussed at the extinction event article, there are a number of these, and they are generally regarded as events, with the other articles named that way, like Triassic–Jurassic extinction event and Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. What do other editors think? @Closed Limelike Curves: This rename was neither minor nor non-controversial, so it should have been discussed first. That said, we can discuss it now. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 02:16, 26 November 2025 (UTC)

No issues with keeping "extinction event"; I was just trying to move everything to a consistent scheme. I've self-reverted since you seem to prefer the current title. Before I started making the moves there was a mix of articles using "mass extinction" vs. "mass extinction event" vs. "extinction" vs. "extinction event":

1. Late Ordovician mass extinction
2. Late Devonian mass extinction
3. Capitanian mass extinction event
4. Permian–Triassic extinction event
5. Triassic–Jurassic extinction event
6. Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event
7. Holocene extinction

I'm happy with any of these, though I originally picked "extinction" as most concise. cc @NGPezz, who seemed to prefer "mass extinction" on another page. – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 02:43, 26 November 2025 (UTC)

@Closed Limelike Curves: Thanks for reverting. And thanks for the list of article names. I didn't realize that they were inconsistent like that. What do other editors think about all this? Let's try to get a discussion going here before we act further. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 03:07, 26 November 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for the revert, and no hard feelings. Some of these events consistently include "mass extinction" as their full title in the scientific literature, others not-so-consistently. I fully understand your intent here, and several of these pages are probably worth renaming to align with broader usage. For example, I moved Late Ordovician mass extinction (LOME) back in 2022, and we've reached a consensus for Late Devonian mass extinction earlier this year. Google scholar hits for alternate names are a pretty reliable metric. The P-Tr extinction is still a good candidate for the next rename. On google scholar, "Permian-Triassic mass extinction" (PTME) (3k hits) exceeds "Permian-Triassic extinction" (2.7k), and far exceeds other options such as "end-Permian extinction event (1.5k), "Permian-Triassic crisis" (1.4k), "Great Dying" (1k, specifying Permian), and the current title "Permian-Triassic extinction event" (800). NGPezz (talk) 04:19, 26 November 2025 (UTC)

In fact, the highest rated option with 9.8 k hits is "end Permian mass extinction" [1]. Hemiauchenia (talk) 00:14, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

OK, sounds like "mass extinction" has the most support. – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 19:43, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Requested move 27 November 2025

Permian–Triassic extinction event → End-Permian mass extinctionEnd-Permian mass extinction – (alt proposal – "Permian-Triassic mass extinction") WP:COMMONAME, as discussed in the section above [2] [3], this is by far the most used name for this event looking on scholar [4], with nearly 10,000 papers mentioning the term, more than triple that of any other contender, with the current title only being used by around 800 papers [5], which is the lowest among the name variants mentioned in the above discussion. There is no current consistency regarding the names of mass extinction articles. Hemiauchenia (talk) 00:30, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Proposing "Permian-Triassic mass extinction" as an alt proposal as the second most common title on google scholar with 3,000 uses [6]. Hemiauchenia (talk) 02:04, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Survey

• Oppose - more in line of what we have here already. I see many permutations of this extinction event with another very common "Permian extinction," but that form is not as concise as it could be. Plus with the Permian having not one but two major extinction events near its end, this is concerned with the biggest one at the boundary between the two periods and eras. Remember that many readers will be poorly informed about this mass extinction and I think they will have a better grasp when the title has two boundaries for the mass extinction. While I can see both sides merits of the term "event" I think this proposal is a poorer choice than what we have with the "Permian–Triassic extinction event." Fyunck(click) (talk) 01:08, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Note - "Permian-Triassic mass extinction" alternate was added after I responded. I can live with that choice but in google ngrams it is far below the simple "Permian–Triassic extinction" terminology. Fyunck(click) (talk) 18:16, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose per Fyunck(click) -- ~2025-32349-50 (talk) 05:49, 27 November 2025 (UTC)
• Support As end-Permian mass extinction is its most common name, it is the name we should use, regardless of how it lines up with other page titles. It's a mass extinction and it occurs at the end of the Permian. Silica Cat (talk) 11:31, 27 November 2025 (UTC)
• Support Permian-Triassic mass extinction. Oppose End-Permian mass extinction second. There are two mass extinctions in the latter half of Permian period. Permian-Triassic makes it clear that it is about the event that straddles the Permian and Triassic periods. TwoNineNineOne (talk) 13:22, 27 November 2025 (UTC)
• Support either proposal. "End-Permian" is distinct from "Late Permian", so there's less concern of confusion with the Capitanian extinction. That said I understand that such concern exists, and I would be happy to go with PTME if that's the consensus here. We should make sure to use all of these alternate names in the intro. NGPezz (talk) 22:50, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

  One thing on the intro. Wikipedia tells us that if there is more than one alternate they should not go in the lead in that manner. It could be a footnote and it could be placed below the lead section in the main body, but a run-on of alternate names in the lead is not per guidelines. Fyunck(click) (talk) 04:53, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose - the present title accurately describes the event, distinguishes it from the other major Permian extinction, and (to my mind at least) doesn't differ materially from the alternatives. RexSueciae (talk) 22:20, 30 November 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose End-Permian mass extinction and neutral on Permian-Triassic mass extinction. As RexSueciae and Fyunk have said, the current name is more clear. While saying "End-Permian" instead of "Late-Permian" does slightly distinguish the event with the Capitanian extinction, it is still leaves much more room for confusion than Permian-Triassic. Additionally, just because a name is more commonly used in scientific literature doesn't mean its more commonly used in colloquial language. While "Great Dying" is probably the most common nickname for it, it is very vague, so I believe Permian-Triassic, which seems to be more common than End-Permian based on google search results and YouTube. Overall, it seems there is very little reason to change the article name, and that the End-Permian mass extinction is a poor choice. Mongoliensis123 (talk) 20:50, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

Discussion

• Comment – I'll not offer an opinion now, except to note that, per WP:SENTENCECASE, "The initial letter of a title is almost always capitalized by default..." So that would be "End-Permian mass extinction", if there's a consensus to change the title of this article. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 01:19, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Corrected. Hemiauchenia (talk) 02:02, 27 November 2025 (UTC)