APS » PROLA » Phys. Rev. Lett. » Volume 82 » Issue 3

Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 652 - 655 (1999)

Environmental Changes, Coextinction, and Patterns in the Fossil Record

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Luís A. Nunes Amaral1 and Martin Meyer2
1Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
2Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215

Received 7 August 1998

We introduce a new model for large scale evolution and extinction in which species are organized into food webs. The system evolves by two processes: origination/speciation and extinction. In the model, extinction of a given species can be due to an externally induced change in the environment or due to the extinction of all preys of that species (coextinction). The model is able to reproduce the empirical observations without defining a fitness function or invoking competition between species.


©1999 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v82/p652
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.82.652
PACS: 87.10.+e, 02.50.Ey, 05.40.-a

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