Prehistoric kingdom game4/6/2024 That study found smaller-bodied genera on average are equally or more likely to than their larger relatives to go extinct. The study builds on recent Stanford research that looked at body size and extinction risk among marine animals in groupings known as genera, one taxonomic level above species. "When we look closely at 485 million years of extinctions and recoveries in the world's oceans, there does appear to be a pattern in what comes back based on body size in some groups." "Ultimately, we want to be able to look at the fossil record and use it to predict what will go extinct, and more importantly, what comes back," said lead author Pedro Monarrez, a postdoctoral scholar in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). Whether and how evolutionary dynamics shift in the wake of global annihilation has "profound implications not only for understanding the origins of the modern biosphere but also for predicting the consequences of the current biodiversity crisis," the authors write. The new study finds evidence for the latter in a sweeping analysis of marine fossils from most of the past half-billion years. Since the 1980s, evolutionary biologists have debated whether mass extinctions and the recoveries that follow them intensify the selection criteria of normal times - or fundamentally shift the set of traits that mark groups of species for destruction.
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