Whenever one reads about the mass extinction events, the high benchmark is always the Permian-Triassic extinction event, when supposedly over 90% of all speices died off. And I won’t doubt that that figure is accurate.
But one would think that that would mean that at least a reasonable proportion of higher taxa went extinct as well. And frankly, I’m not seeing that in the (textbook-level) literature.
Okay, brachiopods got reduced from a major component of the seafloor fauna to a very minor one. But they survived. Trilobites and acanthodians (‘spiny sharks’) died out during the Permian – but well before its end, and both were groups in decline – much as if the tuatara died out today: a whole order would die out with it, but outside New Zealand it would be noticeable only to people interested in such stuff, kind of a ‘celebrity death pool’ item. Several lineages of amphibians died out – but their relatives survived into and dominated the early Triassic.
Even among those families and orders that survived, large numbers of genera and species were wiped out. Snails, for example, had a 98% reduction in the number of genera (from the above link).