The mass extinction at the end-Triassic is one of the five biggest in the Phanerozoic. However,it is the least well understood among these five events, and only till last decade it became a great academic interesting subject to geologists. The evidences for this event come obviously from bivalves, brachiopods, ammonites, corals, radiolaria, ostracods and foraminifera of marine habitats, and plants and tetrapods of terrestrial realm. By contrast, for some of other groups, such as marine gastropods and marine vertebrates, no mass extinction has been recog-nized yet. The extinction event is strongly marked at specific level but shown a complicated situa-tion at generic and family levels. Dramatic changing of the environment, such as the temperature raise due to the greenhouse effect, the marine anoxic habitats caused by a sudden transgression after the regression at the end of Triassic, has been claimed to be the main cause of the extinction. Many hypotheses have been suggested to demonstrate the mechanisms of the environment changing, among which two popular ones are the bolide impact and volcanic eruption. The Triassic-Jurassic (Tr-J) boundary mass extinction event is still poorly understood because no enough data have been obtained from the Tr-J boundary successional sections of both marine and terrestrial sediments, and most of these studies were regionally restricted. The basic aspects of the event and its associated environmental conditions remain poorly characterized and the causal mechanism or mechanisms are equivocal. Some authors even doubt its occurrence. China has many successionally developed terrestrial and marine Tr-J sections. Detailed studies of these sections may be important and significant for well understanding of the event.
DENG Shenghui1,2, LU Yuanzheng1,2,3 & XU Daoyi4 1. Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration and Development, Beijing 100083, China
