"In other words, the extinction rate - the speed at which species are lost - surpasses the speciation rate - the speed at which species are created. This makes the diversification rate negative ...

A team of paleontologists has identified three hitherto unknown fossil fish species in the Swiss Alps, which provide new insights into the diversification ... episode of mass extinction in the ...

Over shorter periods, however, diversification rates vary much less than extinction rates do. That means that evolution doesn't accelerate quickly in response to rapid bursts of extinction.

Extinction also removes the advantages of ecological incumbents—who themselves took advantage of a previous episode of rapid diversification, in many cases after an extinction event—and opens ...

The rate at which a clade accumulates species depends on the balance between speciation and extinction. In recent years, phylogenetic studies have shown that such net diversification rates vary ...

"It now appears that the major diversification of placental mammals closely followed the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago, an event that would have opened up ecological space for ...

But diversification data don't reveal the whole story. Species might be going extinct continuously but could still become more diverse if species formation happens more often than extinction.

Though a few primitive mammal species coexisted with the dinosaurs, it was the ecological space left in the wake of Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event that allowed the diversification of ...

The 500-million-year history of life on Earth is a series of booms and busts. But while the busts, or extinctions, can be either sudden or gradual, the booms of diversification of new organisms ...

All this diversification stems from what was happening within the reefs themselves. For example, we suggest that the extinction and turnover of corals, and other changes to the structure and ...