Causes and Consequences of Extinction and Survival in Fossil Marine Invertebrates with a Special Focus on the Crinoidea (Phylum Echinodermata).

TL;DRAbstract

In the geologic past, certain traits increased the chance of survival of some marine invertebrate taxa, which means that extinction did not occur randomly. However, it has been claimed that these traits buffer less against extinction at mass extinction events. Herein, a method for detecting selective extinction shows that during both background and mass extinction times, extinction of marine invertebrate genera was non-random for most of the Phanerozoic Eon. The two best-known mass extinctions, the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg), and the Permian-Triassic (P-Tr), appear to have been highly selective. It is shown that extinction will appear random at the genus level with respect to the number of species in a genus when extinction is highly selective at the species level. A phylogenetic analysis of 51 crinoid species (Phylum Echinodermata: Class Crinoidea) addresses major, unresolved questions in crinoid evolutionary history: how many lineages survived the P-Tr extinction event? Did extincti

Chat with Paper

AI Agents for this Paper