McMicken Geologist Published in Science Magazine
With the economy, we talk about cycles of boom and bust. Make that bust and boom when it comes to the geological record in the post-Paleozoic world, University of Cincinnati geologist Arnold Miller suggests, after his analysis of marine fossil genera and what happens after mass extinction events.
The bust is a mass extinction event, caused by events such as an ice age or an asteroid hitting the earth. The boom, as Miller has found, is that evolutionary groups have a significantly better longevity in the geologic record if they first appear right after a mass extinction event. Miller writes about these findings in the Nov. 7 issue of
Science
, with co-author Michael Foote of the University of Chicago. The study examined longevity trends throughout the last 540 million years (the Phanerozoic eon), using a database of marine fossil genera compiled by the late J. John Sepkoski.
Read the
full story> on UC's website and
in Science Magazine (pdf).
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