What are Disaster Taxa?
Disaster taxa are groups of organisms that resettle areas destroyed by a natural disaster, such as a volcanic eruption, or survives a major mass extinction. The classic examples are fungi and lichen, which are among the first to colonize disaster areas, and microscopic animals accustomed to living in almost every conceivable ecosystem, such as nematodes. In the case of disaster taxa that survive mass extinctions, they may serve as the basis for a new adaptive radiation and their ancestors will possess features derived from them. As for larger disaster taxa, one famous example is Lystrosaurus, a distant ancestor of modern animals that was the dominant terrestrial vertebrate for millions of years when it was one of the only survivors of the Permian-Triassic extinction (the most severe in history, occuring 251 million years ago), making up 95% of all land vertebrate fossils. This is thought to be the only time in planetary history that an organism dominated the land to such a degree. Name
