Tetrapod species-area relationships across the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction.

ABSTRACT: Mass extinctions are rare but catastrophic events that profoundly disrupt biodiversity. Widely accepted consequences of mass extinctions, such as biodiversity loss and the appearance of temporary "disaster taxa," imply that species-area relationships (SARs, or how biodiversity scales with area) should change dramatically across these events: Specifically, both the slope (the rate of accumulation of new species with increasing area) and intercept (the density of species at local scales) of the power-law relationship should decrease. However, these hypotheses have not been tested, and the contribution of variation in the SAR to diversity dynamics in deep time has been neglected. We use fossil data to quantify nested SARs in North American terrestrial tetrapods through the Cretaceous-Paleogen

SUBMITTER: Close RA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12002258 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature