Phanerozoic mass extinctions

E415306

mass extinction event series paleontological phenomenon

Phanerozoic mass extinctions are the handful of catastrophic, globally disruptive biodiversity crises over the last ~540 million years that abruptly wiped out large proportions of Earth’s species and reshaped the course of evolution.

Try in SPARQL Jump to: Surface forms Statements Referenced by

All labels observed (3)

Label	Occurrences
Big Five mass extinctions	1
Phanerozoic mass extinction record	1
Phanerozoic mass extinctions canonical	1

Statements (49)

Predicate	Object
instanceOf	mass extinction event series ⓘ paleontological phenomenon ⓘ
affects	evolutionary trajectories of major clades ⓘ global ecosystems ⓘ marine biodiversity ⓘ terrestrial biodiversity ⓘ
causeOf	abrupt reduction in taxonomic diversity ⓘ collapse of some ecosystems ⓘ faunal turnover ⓘ floral turnover ⓘ
characterizedBy	abrupt global biodiversity loss ⓘ elevated extinction rates across multiple clades ⓘ geologically rapid species turnover ⓘ global environmental disruption ⓘ
definedBy	sharp peaks in extinction intensity in fossil record ⓘ
evidenceFrom	isotopic excursions in sedimentary rocks ⓘ marine invertebrate fossil record ⓘ palynological records ⓘ terrestrial vertebrate fossil record ⓘ
followedBy	evolutionary radiations ⓘ origination of new clades ⓘ restructuring of food webs ⓘ
hasCause	bolide impacts (for some events) ⓘ large igneous province volcanism (for several events) ⓘ ocean anoxia ⓘ perturbations of the carbon cycle ⓘ rapid climate change ⓘ sea-level fluctuations ⓘ
hasEffect	expansion of ecological generalists after crises ⓘ extinction of many specialist taxa ⓘ long-term changes in biodiversity baselines ⓘ shifts in dominance among major taxonomic groups ⓘ
hasPart	Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary ⓘ surface form: Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction End-Ordovician mass extinction ⓘ End-Permian mass extinction ⓘ End-Triassic mass extinction ⓘ Late Cambrian extinction events ⓘ Late Devonian mass extinction ⓘ Eocene–Oligocene climate transition ⓘ surface form: Paleogene (Eocene–Oligocene) extinction events Quaternary megafaunal extinctions ⓘ
numberOfMajorEvents	five to six commonly recognized events ⓘ
partOf	Phanerozoic Eon ⓘ
startTime	approximately 541 million years ago ⓘ
studiedBy	geochemistry ⓘ geology ⓘ paleoclimatology ⓘ paleoecology ⓘ paleontology ⓘ
temporalLocation	Phanerozoic Eon ⓘ

How these facts were elicited

The pipeline generated the facts above by prompting gpt-5.1 with this entity's name + description and the instruction below.

Instruction

You are a knowledge base construction expert. Given a subject entity and a description of it, return factual statements that you know for the subject as a JSON list of dictionaries(triples), where keys must be "subject", "predicate" and "object". The number of facts may be very high, between 25 to 50 or more, for very popular subjects. For less popular subjects, the number of facts can be very low, like 5 or 10.

# Requirements
- If you don't know the subject at all, return an empty list.
- If the subject is not a named entity, return an empty list.
- Include at least one triple where predicate is "instanceOf".
- Do not get too wordy.
- Separate several objects into multiple triples with one object.

Input

Subject: Phanerozoic mass extinctions
Description of subject: Phanerozoic mass extinctions are the handful of catastrophic, globally disruptive biodiversity crises over the last ~540 million years that abruptly wiped out large proportions of Earth’s species and reshaped the course of evolution.

Referenced by (3)

Full triples — surface form annotated when it differs from this entity's canonical label.

Late Devonian extinction → partOf → Phanerozoic mass extinctions ⓘ

Triassic–Jurassic extinction event → partOf → Phanerozoic mass extinctions ⓘ

this entity surface form: Phanerozoic mass extinction record

Great Dying → partOf → Phanerozoic mass extinctions ⓘ

this entity surface form: Big Five mass extinctions