The Great Dying: The Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Earth

Everyone knows the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Almost nobody talks about the extinction that was far worse — the one that came close to ending complex life entirely, and left the planet so empty that a single stubby, tusked animal ended up making up most of the land vertebrates left alive. This is what Earth looked like when all the land was welded into one supercontinent: an interior so far from the ocean that rain never reached it, seasons that swung between flood and furnace, shallow seas going lifeless, and dunes where forests used to be. We look at why Pangaea's geography made things so brutal, what actually died and what didn't, how burrowing saved the survivors, how long recovery really took, and what the world became once the continent finally started to tear itself apart. CHAPTERS 0:00 One continent, one ocean 0:20 Ground that hasn't seen rain in years 0:50 The animal that shouldn't have made it 1:20 How Pangaea broke the weather 1:50 Why this was worse than the asteroid 2:20 The seas go quiet 2:50 A desert in the middle of a continent 3:20 Surviving the extremes 4:20 Dunes where forests were 4:50 Dead water 5:20 Inheriting an empty world 6:20 Living underground 6:50 The first green comes back 7:20 Shallow seas and new coasts 8:00 The continent starts to split 8:20 The world that came next New deep-time and prehistory videos every week — subscribe. #history #prehistory #extinction #pangaea #paleontology #geology #science #documentary