A new study identified fossil records to have a glimpse of ancient life's history. The aim of the study is to determine the fluctuating population of the prehistoric communities of the planet throughout global mass extinctions.
The investigation was possible through an algorithm similar to what the social media platform Facebook utilizes in making friend suggestions.
State of Biodiversity During Mass Extinctions
Biodiversity in communities around the planet is expected to drop whenever a mass extinction occurs. Most species lessen or even wipe out entirely.
The number of communities studied in previous papers was a general approximation of animals living in the same area. However, they did not include the overall loss of the specific biodiversities that belong in these areas during a mass extinction event. This results in discrepancies to observations from mass extinction's ecological impact and association with the number of certain species affected.
Cornell College Department of Geology expert and lead author of the study Drew Muscente said in a PhysOrg report that there are major events throughout the entire history that witnessed massive shifts in communities, but only a few species were not able to survive.
Muscente, who was a part of The University of Texas at Austin's Department of Geological Sciences, explained that on the flip side, there were many species that disappeared despite the ecosystems and communities unaffected.
The research produced substantial evidence that highlights the essentiality of the ancient communities in larger studies regarding the shifts of the environment from the past until today.
Fellow geosciences expert and co-author of the paper Rowan Martindale said that the purpose of the investigation is to determine the changes of the communities that serve as factors to the entire ecosystem's initial transformation.
Social Network: New Approach on Studying Paleocommunities
Studying communities from fossil records is challenging for specialists. The majority of paleontological examinations heavily rely on sampling and comparison of collections extracted from rocks varying with site locations and age.
The modern computational approach still focuses on a small dataset of paleocommunity samples that were observed in hundreds or even thousands of fossilized remains. Because of the limiting system, the approach could exclusively work only with a particular region and period. The gathered information is not sufficient to fill in the remaining evidence for an entire record.
In the study, the difficulty of identifying and consolidating each fossil was resolved through an algorithm used by Facebook. Its method utilizes network analysis that makes the social database gather and connect users with mutual associations.
The new research is the first to apply network analysis in detecting paleocommunities under the collective marine animal life, Muscente said. The experiment involved the timeline over the past 542 million years, from when the biodiversity of animals initially manifested up until the planet's current era.
The study concluded that over the history of animals, mass extinction events varied on impacts to species and ecosystems. Some of the events changed communities over biodiversity, some had converse effects, while the remaining had balanced effects between the aspects.
The findings were published in the journal Geology, titled "Appearance and disappearance rates of Phanerozoic marine animal paleocommunities."
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