Triassic Period

Triassic Period, in geologic time, the first period of the Mesozoic Era. It began 252 million years ago, at the close of the Permian Period, and ended 201 million years ago, when it was succeeded by the Jurassic Period.

The Triassic Period marked the beginning of major changes that were to take place throughout the Mesozoic Era, particularly in the distribution of continents, the evolution of life, and the geographic distribution of living things. At the beginning of the Triassic, virtually all the major landmasses of the world were collected into the supercontinent of Pangea. Terrestrial climates were predominately warm and dry (though seasonal monsoons occurred over large areas), and the Earth’s crust was relatively quiescent. At the end of the Triassic, however, plate tectonic activity picked up, and a period of continental rifting began. On the margins of the continents, shallow seas, which had dwindled in area at the end of the Permian, became more extensive; as sea levels gradually rose, the waters of continental shelves were colonized for the first time by large marine reptiles and reef-building corals of modern aspect.

geologic time

The Triassic followed on the heels of the largest mass extinction in the history of the Earth. This event occurred at the end of the Permian, when 85 to 95 percent of marine invertebrate species and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrate genera died out. During the recovery of life in the Triassic Period, the relative importance of land animals grew. Reptiles increased in diversity and number, and the first dinosaurs appeared, heralding the great radiation that would characterize this group during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Finally, the end of the Triassic saw the appearance of the first mammals—tiny, fur-bearing, shrewlike animals derived from reptiles.

Another episode of mass extinction occurred at the end of the Triassic. Though this event was less devastating than its counterpart at the end of the Permian, it did result in drastic reductions of some living populations—particularly of the ammonoids, primitive mollusks that have served as important index fossils for assigning relative ages to various strata in the Triassic System of rocks.

The name Trias (later modified to Triassic) was first proposed in 1834 by the German paleontologist Friedrich August von Alberti for a sequence of rock strata in central Germany that lay above Permian rocks and below Jurassic rocks. (The name Trias referred to the division of these strata into three units: the Bunter [or Buntsandstein], Muschelkalk, and Keuper.) Alberti’s rock sequence, which became known as the “Germanic facies,” had many drawbacks as a standard for assigning relative ages to Triassic rocks from other regions of the world, and so for much of the 19th and 20th centuries Triassic stages were based mainly on type sections from the “Alpine facies” in Austria, Switzerland, and northern Italy. Since the mid-20th century more complete sequences have been discovered in North America, and these now serve as the standard for Triassic time in general. Meanwhile, studies of seafloor spreading and plate tectonics have yielded important new information on the paleogeography and paleoclimatology of the Triassic, allowing for a better understanding of the evolution and extinction of life-forms and of the paleoecology and paleobiogeography of the period. In addition, paleontologists continue to be occupied with defining the lower and upper boundaries of the Triassic System on a worldwide basis and with understanding the reasons for the mass extinctions that took place at those boundaries.