[garybob]

The real fact is, 98.5% of all life on earth died during that period.

And you know how much life constituted 100%? Really? What was the population numbers and what did the population consist of?

My point is this: Know the difference between a fact and a theory. This is a big planet and many have confused local events for global events. With the planet made up of 80% water, don't presume 98.5% of anything died off.

[jnaujok]

If I have a fossil record, and the record before time period X shows 1000 species, and after time period X, I see only 15 species, then I can state unequivocally that the fossil record shows that 98.5% of all species have died off.

The fact that it's a big planet just means that I have a lot more fossil records showing the same thing, and improving my degree of assurance that the statement is accurate.

Oh, and the planet is 71% water, and all of those lifeforms that I refer to lived in or on the water. The nice part is that massive ocean kills sink wonderfully to the bottom and become part of the sedimentary record. The *fact* that this same die-off appears at the same time in all the fossil records all around the world puts paid to your "local event" idea. The production of oxygen as the waste product of phytoplanktons was the greatest threat to life in the history of the planet. Worse than the extinction of the dinosaurs, worse than any other event in the fossil history.

That is a *fact* not a conjecture. The evidence is massive and well researched. The level of confidence in the oxygen die-off is 99.99999999%. You'll note, it's not 100%, because that's the scientific method. Tomorrow we could find out that aliens came down and culled the planet. But that would only null out the *method* of extinction, not the *FACT* that it happened.