Everett Olson and His Contribution to the Mass Extinction Narrative.
Greetings. Olson's Extinction, named after paleontologist Everett C. Olson, was a mass extinction that occurred approximately 273 million years ago during the Late Permian period. The extinction predated the monumental Permian/Triassic extinction event by a few million years. Olson first identified a substantial gap in fossil record strongly indicating an abrupt change between the early Permian and middle/late Permian faunas. This event has been argued by many paleontologists to have affected many taxa, including embryophytes, marine metazoans, and tetrapods. The first signs that indicated extinction came to light when Olson noted a hiatus between early Permian faunas dominated by pelycosaurs and the therapsid-dominated faunas of the middle and late Permian. Initially taken to be a preservational gap in the fossil record, the event was originally dubbed "Olson's Gap." To compound the difficulty in identifying the cause of the "gap," paleontologists had diff...