An examination of the impact of Olson's extinction on tetrapods from Texas

PeerJ
Neil Brocklehurst

Abstract

It has been suggested that a transition between a pelycosaurian-grade synapsid dominated fauna of the Cisuralian (early Permian) and the therapsid dominated fauna of the Guadalupian (middle Permian) was accompanied by, and possibly driven by, a mass extinction dubbed Olson's Extinction. However, this interpretation of the record has recently been criticised as being a result of inappropriate time-binning strategies: calculating species richness within international stages or substages combines extinctions occurring throughout the late Kungurian stage into a single event. To address this criticism, I examine the best record available for the time of the extinction, the tetrapod-bearing formations of Texas, at a finer stratigraphic scale than those previously employed. Species richness is calculated using four different time-binning schemes: the traditional Land Vertebrate Faunachrons (LVFs); a re-definition of the LVFs using constrained cluster analysis; individual formations treated as time bins; and a stochastic approach assigning specimens to half-million-year bins. Diversity is calculated at the genus and species level, both with and without subsampling, and extinction rates are also inferred. Under all time-binning schemes,...Continue Reading

References

Feb 19, 2004·The American Naturalist·Helmut Hillebrand
Sep 22, 1972·Science·D M Raup
Jan 17, 2008·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Sarda Sahney, Michael J Benton
Jun 29, 2012·Ecology Letters·Moriaki YasuharaDanielle K Stoll
Oct 22, 2013·Trends in Ecology & Evolution·Philip D MannionAnjali Goswami
Apr 7, 2017·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Neil BrocklehurstJörg Fröbisch

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Citations

Jul 28, 2021·Nature Ecology & Evolution·Neil Brocklehurst, Roger J Benson

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Software Mentioned

CONISS
Dryad
R
R Core
rioja

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