Decline in extinction rates and scale invariance in the fossil record

Details Decline in extinction rates and scale invariance in the fossil record Decline in extinction rates and scale invariance in the fossil record

1998-09-22

arxiv.org/abs/adap-org/9809004v1

Paleobiology 25, 434-439 (1999)

Nonlinear Sciences

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems

11 pages including 3 postscript figures, typeset in LaTeX 2e using the Elsevier macro package elsart.cls

Scientific paper

We show that the decline in the extinction rate during the Phanerozoic can be accurately parameterized by a logarithmic fit to the cumulative total extinction. This implies that extinction intensity is falling off approximately as the reciprocal of time. We demonstrate that this observation alone is sufficient to explain the existence of the proposed power-law forms in the distribution of the sizes of extinction events and in the power spectrum of Phanerozoic extinction, results which previously have been explained by appealing to self-organized critical theories of evolutionary dynamics.

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