Permian. Birth of a new world

300 million years ago, the world fell apart at the seams like it had never done before. Powerful volcanic eruptions shook almost the entire northern hemisphere. The landscape changed completely. There were profound changes in the flora. The large scale trees and giant horsetail died out, but this opened up space for conifers and the ancestors of the flowering plants. They now characterize the flora on every continent. More and more animals ventured from the water onto land. The entire living environment became more and more complex and specialized. A large number of completely different groups of animals soon roamed the Earth: this included the ancestors of mammals and of the dinosaurs.