The findings, published today in Nature, were reached through a pioneering model that reconstructs the diversity of marine animals from their origin - some 550 million years ago- to the present, based on plate tectonics and environmental factors, mainly ocean temperature and food supply.
The findings, published today in Nature, were reached through a pioneering model that reconstructs the diversity of marine animals from their origin - some 550 million years ago- to the present, based on plate tectonics and environmental factors, mainly ocean temperature and food supply.
Unlike the fossil record, the new model is free from gaps and sampling biases, as the history of diversity in the model is numerically simulated rather than being reconstructed from fossil data. The model reveals that the increase in diversity is real and is associated with the development of diversity hotspots during the last 200 million years, when the Earth's environmental conditions were relatively stable.
For the preparation of the work, the scientific team used a palaeogeographic model that tracks the movements of continents and the seafloor through geological time and a paleo-Earth system model that reconstructs the environmental conditions of ancient seas. In the model, each tracked region accumulates diversity over time at a rate controlled by the environmental conditions of each region and at each time.
Read more at: University of Bristol
Graph showing development of marine biodiversity hotspots (Photo Credit: Pedro Cermeno)
