* Astronomy

Ancient environment found to drive marine biodiversity

Much of our knowledge about past life has come from the fossil record - but how accurately does that reflect the true history and drivers of biodiversity on Earth?

"It's a question that goes back a long way to the time of Darwin, who looked at the fossil record and tried to understand what it tells us about the history of life" - Shanan Peters, an assistant professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In fact, the fossil record can tell us a great deal, he says in a new study. In a report published Friday, Nov. 25 in Science magazine, he and colleague Bjarte Hannisdal, of the University of Bergen in Norway, show that the evolution of marine life over the past 500 million years has been robustly and independently driven by both ocean chemistry and sea level changes.
The time period studied covered most of the Phanerozoic eon, which extends to the present and includes the evolution of most plant and animal life.

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