Supercomputer scours fossil record for Earth’s hidden extinctions

Mass extinctions in the marine fossil record.

A new compilation of fossil data on invertebrate and vertebrate families indicates that four mass extinctions in the marine realm are statistically distinct from background extinction levels. These four occurred late in the Ordovician, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous periods. A fifth extinction event in the Devonian stands out from the background but is not statistically significant in these ...

Mass extinctions in the fossil record.

Extinctions and Biodiversity in the Fossil Record

Volume 2, The Earth system: biological and ecological dimensions of global environmental change, pp 297–301

Information for : Delayed biological recovery from extinctions throughout the fossil record

Randomization methods offer two important advantages over classical estimates of statistical significance. First, one need not be able to mathematically derive the distribution of possible outcomes under the null hypothesis, since one can construct it by simulation instead. Second, the original data need not obey any particular distribution, since any of their potentially troublesome features (...

Fossil embryos deep in the fossil record

Embryos have been found in ‘old’ rocks on four continents, especially in Siberia, Nevada, Australia and China. They have been discovered in sedimentary rocks of even Late Neoproterozoic age, assuming the evolutionary geological column1 (figure 1). The Neoproterozoic is the period, so called, between 1 billion and 550 million years ago. This discovery was in the Doushantuo Formation, Guizhou Pro...