Macro-Ecological Revolutions
Benjamin Deniston (Benjamin.Deniston@gmail.com)
The other night the abstract of a 2002 academic paper on evolution drew out my curiosity, specifically its last sentence,
"Early Paleozoic radiations established stable ecosystem relationships, and thereafter only the great era-bounding mass extinctions were able to break patterns of incumbency, permitting the emergence of new community structures with distinct proportional diversity relationships."
[Richard Bambach, Andrew Knoll, and John Sepkoski; Anatomical and ecological constraints on Phanerozoic animal diversity in the marine realm, May 14, 2002; PNAS. ]
This 2002 study examines the changes in marine biodiversity over the past half billion years, as expressed to us in the fossil records.
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