Ancient environment found to drive marine biodiversity

Ancient environment found to drive marine biodiversity

Much of our knowledge about past life has come from the fossil record – but how accurately does that reflect the true history and drivers of biodiversity on Earth? "It's a question that goes back a long way to the time of Darwin, who looked at the fossil record and tried to understand what it tells us about the history of life," says Shanan Peters, an assistant professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In fact, the fossil record can tell us a great deal, he says in a new study. In a report published Friday, Nov. 25 in Science magazine, he and colleague Bjarte Hannisdal, of the University of Bergen in Norway, show that the evolution of marine life over the past 500 million years has been robustly and independently driven by both ocean chemistry and sea level changes.

BIO101 – Current Biological Diversity

Link: BIO101 – Current Biological Diversity

In this lecture, as well as in the previous one and the next one, I tackle areas of Biology where I am really weak: origin of life, diversity of life, and taxonomy/systematics. These are also areas where there has been a lot of change recently (often not yet incorporated into textbooks), and I am unlikely to be up-to-date, so please help me bring these lectures up to standards…. This post was originally written in 2006 and re-posted a few times, including in 2010.