Mass extinctions show selective patterns in crinoid body size
Abstract
There have been five major extinctions on planet Earth: the end of the Ordovician, late Devonian, late Permian, late Triassic and the late Cretaceous and through all of these, Crinoids have still managed to prosper. Our project attempts to find a correlation between these five mass extinctions and the body size of Crinoids. Past research has shown that bigger animals are more prone to extinction compared to smaller sized ones because of their complex environmental niches. We hypothesized that small-sized Crinoids would have a higher possibility of survival compared to the larger-sized Crinoids. We first graphed Crinoids' maximum body size and the five major extinctions throughout time for any visual correlation between them. We then used t-tests as our statistical analyses to find any differences between the size of survivors and. There was no mean difference between the mean size of victims and survivors with the exception of the end of the Triassic extinction. There are many possible explanations for this difference in the end of the Triassic such as 1) a rise in atmospheric CO2, 2) a combination was volcanic CO2 and catastrophic dissociation of gas hydrate, and/or 3) a cooling in temperature and oceanic changes occurred.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFMED41A0727S
- Keywords:
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- 0444 BIOGEOSCIENCES Evolutionary geobiology;
- 0410 BIOGEOSCIENCES Biodiversity;
- 0850 EDUCATION Geoscience education research