New Delhi, April 7 -- Some 252 million years ago, the planet experienced the Great Dying - the largest extinction event in Earth's history. It wiped out around 80-90 per cent of marine species and approximately 70 per cent of land-based vertebrate families. In the years that followed, fossil records showed that many of the surviving organisms looked strikingly similar, regardless of where they lived, a phenomenon that has long puzzled scientists.

A new study published in the journal Science Advances has offered clues to explain this global "sameness". Researchers referred to it as taxonomic homogenisation - a process in which species composition across different ecological communities begins to resemble one another more closely over time...