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Fossil remains show that sometime around 252 million years ago, about 90 percent of all species on Earth were suddenly wiped out - by far the largest of this planet's five known mass extinctions. A new work suggests the perpetrators were a form of microbes - specifically, methane-producing archaea called Methanosarcina - that suddenly bloomed explosively in the oceans, spewing prodigious amounts of methane into the atmosphere and dramatically changing the climate and the chemistry of the oceans. [Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology News]
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