“The death of the forests – primarily comprised of conifers, which are distant relatives of today’s pines and firs – was part of the largest extinction of life on Earth, which occurred when today’s continents were part of one supercontinent, Pangaea. The so-called Permian extinction likely was triggered by immense volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. The huge amounts of gas and dust thrown into the atmosphere altered global climate, and some 95 percent of marine organisms and 70 percent of land organisms eventually went extinct.”
“The researchers acknowledge that conifer forests probably suffered from other environmental stresses as a result of the long-term volcanic eruptions, which spewed carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere and likely destroyed some of Earth’s protective ozone layer. Nevertheless, they wrote in their paper, “… whatever (the) sequence of events that triggered ecosystem destabilization on land, the aggressiveness of soil-borne pathogenic fungi must have been an integral factor involved in Late Permian forest decline worldwide.”
It took conifers 4 to 5 million years to recover form the end of Permian extinction–just saying…
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-climate-tree-killing-fungi.html
Berkeley Press Release: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/08/05/fungi-helped-destroy-forests-during-mass-extinction-250-million-years-ago/