After the extinction occurred estimates say only a third of land life remained and only 5% of sea life remained . The PTB event also had the longest recovery time of any mass extinction, lasting 5 million to 8 million years due to other, more minor, extinction events taking place after the Permian extinction (Erwin 1998). An abundance of Fungi found in boundary rocks and a lack of tree pollen found in these same rocks suggests an immediate increase of fungi’s just after the PTB event that fed off of the decaying tree matter, this was known as the ‘fungil spike’ (Visscher 2011). Research then suggests that oddly the top of the food chain recovered before the bottom half of the food chain. Usually it would be expected for the bottom part of a food chain to form the foundations to support the upper half of the food chain e.g. predators. However it’s estimated to have taken 5 million years for animals at the top of the food chain to emerge, but 50 million years for the underlying ecosystem to bounce back (Twitchett 2007). Reptiles were one of the quickest to recover; within a million years synapsid diversity recovered (Visscher 2011).