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Determinants of extinction in the fossil record

Nature volume 416, pages 420–424 (2002)Cite this article

Abstract

The causes of mass extinctions and the nature of biological selectivity at extinction events are central questions in palaeobiology. It has long been recognized, however, that the amount of sedimentary rock available for sampling may bias perceptions of biodiversity1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and estimates of taxonomic rates of evolution5,6,7,8. This problem has been particularly noted with respect to the principal mass extinctions5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12. Here we use a new compilation of the amount of exposed marine sedimentary rock to predict how the observed fossil record of extinction would appear if the time series of true extinction rates were in fact smooth. Many features of the highly variable record of apparent extinction rates within marine animals can be predicted on the basis of temporal variation in the amount of exposed rock. Although this result is consistent with the possibility that a common geological cause determines both true extinction rates and the amount of exposed rock, it also supports the hypothesis that much of the observed short-term volatility in extinction rates is an artefact of variability in the stratigraphic record.

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Figure 1: Observed extinction rate per lineage Myr (see Methods) and the number of marine formations in the combined data set.
Figure 2: Observed extinction rates and predicted apparent extinction rates based on filtering a smooth extinction history through the empirically calibrated time series of preservation rates using the combined compilation.
Figure 3: Null distributions of linear product–moment correlation coefficients generated by randomizing the combined formation time series.

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Acknowledgements

We thank R. H. De Simone, E. G. Hunt, S. M. Kidwell, A. McGowan and A. M. Ziegler for discussions. D. B. Rowley provided rock area data. We also thank R. H. De Simone, J. Huss, D. Jablonski, A. I. Miller, D. M. Raup and A. B. Smith for reading the manuscript. This work was supported by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US National Science Foundation, the Paleontological Society, and the Society of Sigma Xi.

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  1. Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, 5734 S. Ellis Avenue, Chicago, 60637, Illinois, USA

    Shanan E. Peters & Michael Foote

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Correspondence to Shanan E. Peters.

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Peters, S., Foote, M. Determinants of extinction in the fossil record. Nature 416, 420–424 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/416420a

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