Fossil Record Reflects Recent Flowering of Marine Biodiversity

The apparent increase in marine biodiversity over the last 50 to 100 million years is real and not just a false reading produced by the inconsistencies of the fossil record, says a team of paleontologists led by David Jablonski.

This finding, published in the May 16 issue of Science, may help scientists place the future of global biodiversity in its proper context.

"If you want to understand what's going to come in the future, you need to understand the dynamics that led up to the biodiversity we see now," said Jablonski, the William Kenan, Jr., Professor in Geophysical Sciences and Chair of the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at Chicago.

By some measures, up to 50 percent of the increase in marine animal biodiversity during the last 50 million years can be attributed to what paleontologists call "the pull of the recent."

This is the idea, posed in 1979 by University of Chicago paleontologist David Raup, that the level of biodiversity is inflated in younger fossil deposits because sampling of the modern world is so much more complete than in the geologic past.

Harvard University paleontologist Richard Bambach lauded the science study as a major step toward dispelling lingering doubts about the true extent of biodiversity during the Cenozoic Era, which began after the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago and continues today.

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