It took a decade of painstaking study, the cooperation of hundreds of researchers, and a database of more than 200,000 fossil records, but John Alroy thinks he's disproved much of the conventional wisdom about the diversity of marine fossils and extinction rates.
Alroy, a researcher with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara, is the principal author of the new report published in Science. A team that included 34 other researchers, who began their work in 1998, coauthored the report.
Alroy's report shows a new curve in the diversity of ancient marine invertebrate species such as clams, sand dollars and lobsters, while also revealing that most of the early propagation of invertebrates took place before the Late Cretaceous period. In addition, the research contends that the increase of those invertebrates in the period since is relatively small when compared to the 100 million years that elapsed.
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