New Theory Links Biodiversity to the Stars, page 1

The rise and fall of species on Earth might be driven in part by the undulating motions of our solar system as it travels through the disk of the Milky Way, scientists say.

Two years ago, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley found the marine fossil record shows that biodiversity—the number of different species alive on the planet—increases and decreases on a 62-million-year cycle. At least two of the Earth’s great mass extinctions—the Permian extinction 250 million years ago and the Ordovician extinction about 450 million years ago—correspond with peaks of this cycle, which can’t be explained by evolutionary theory.

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The 62 million year fossil diversity cycle is most evident in the historical records of genera that survived less than 45 million years. A genera is a group of similar species. Curiously, some organisms seem immune to the cycle. Corals, sponges and trilobites follow the cycle, while fish, squid and snails do not. Credit: Robert Rohde and Richard Muller, U.C. Berkeley