Re: paleonet Mass extinctions every 62 million years

From
Date
Reply-To
Yes, this was published in this week's Nature

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v434/n7030/full/nature03339_fs.html

Of course it's not a new idea, and goes back to David Raup's work with Sepkoski, proposing the 26Ma periodicity of mass extinctions. This study is very statistical, and is based on Sepkoski's database. In the article the authors discuss what this periodicity could represent, but can offer no reasons for it. I've always been useless with statistics without a textbook in front of me so i skipped the details of the study, but I'd be interested in hearing any comments on that. I am very intruiged, but skeptical.

Breandán


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dr. Lisa E. Park" <lepark@uakron.edu>
To: paleonet@nhm.ac.uk
Subject: paleonet Mass extinctions every 62 million years
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 13:32:30 -0500

> 
> This just posted on Science In the News:
> 
> MASS EXTINCTION COMES EVERY 62 MILLION YEARS, UC PHYSICISTS DISCOVER
> from San Francisco Chronicle
> 
> With surprising and mysterious regularity, life on Earth has flourished and
> vanished in cycles of mass extinction every 62 million years, say two UC
> Berkeley scientists who discovered the pattern after a painstaking computer
> study of fossil records going back for more than 500 million years.
> 
> Their findings are certain to generate a renewed burst of speculation among
> scientists who study the history and evolution of life. Each period of
> abundant life and each mass extinction has itself covered at least a few
> million years -- and the trend of biodiversity has been rising steadily ever
> since the last mass extinction, when dinosaurs and millions of other life
> forms went extinct about 65 million years ago. The Berkeley researchers are
> physicists, not biologists or geologists or paleontologists, but they have
> analyzed the most exhaustive compendium offossil records that exists -- data
> that cover the first and last known appearances of no fewer than 36,380
> separate marine genera, including millions of species that once thrived in
> the world's seas, later virtually disappeared, and in many cases returned.
> http://tinyurl.com/4xbsx

-- 
_______________________________________________
For the largest FREE email in Ireland (25MB) and 20MB of online file storage space - Visit http://www.campus.ie

Powered by Outblaze