ITHACA, N.Y. The evolutionary history of diatoms -- abundant oceanic plankton that remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year -- needs to be rewritten, according to a new Cornell study. The findings suggest that after a sudden rise in species numbers, diatoms abruptly declined about 33 million years ago -- trends that coincided with severe global cooling.
The study is published in the Jan. 8 issue of the journal Nature.
The research casts doubt on the long-held theory that diatoms' success was tied to an influx of nutrients into the oceans from the rise of grasslands about 18 million years ago. New evidence from a study led by graduate student Dan Rabosky of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology takes into account a widespread problem in paleontology: that younger fossils are easier to find than older ones.
"We just tried to address the simple fact that the number of available fossils is colossally greater from recent time periods than from earlier time periods," Rabosky said. "It's a pretty standard correction in some fields, but it hasn't been applied to planktonic paleontology up till now."
More than 90 percent of known diatom fossils are younger than 18 million years. So an unadjusted survey of diatom fossils suggests that more diatom species were alive in the recent past than 18 million years ago.
The dearth of early fossils is understandable. Sampling for diatom fossils requires immense drill ships to bore into seafloor sediment. To find an ancient fossil, scientists first have to find ancient sediment -- and that's no easy task because plate tectonics constantly shift the ocean floor, fossils and all. Much of the seafloor is simply too young to sample.
So Rabosky and co-author Ulf Sorhannus of Edinboro University of Pennsylvania controlled for how many samples had been taken from each million-year period of the Earth's history, going back 40 million years. After
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| Contact: Blaine Friedlander bpf2@cornell.edu 607-254-8093 Cornell University Communications Source:Eurekalert |
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