Selectivity of extinction among sea urchins at the end of the Cretaceous period

Andrew B. Smith () and Charlotte H. Jeffery
Additional contact information
Andrew B. Smith: The Natural History Museum
Charlotte H. Jeffery: The Natural History Museum

Nature, 1998, vol. 392, issue 6671, 69-71

Abstract: Abstract By compiling large databases and searching for environmental and palaeobiological correlates associated with survival, insight can be gained into the driving mechanisms involved in mass extinctions1,2,3,4. Although this approach lacks precise temporal resolution and thus cannot be used to investigate how rapidly extinction took place, it provides a broad overview, less plagued by sampling problems caused by shifting facies. Here we present a global analysis of a major marine invertebrate group, the sea urchins, which suffered 36% extinction at genus level in the late Maastrichtian age and continuing high levels of extinction in the Danian age. No preferential survivorship was found for clades with widespread distribution, but there was a strong correlation between feeding strategy and survivorship at the end of the Cretaceous period. Surprisingly, however, clades whose larvae must feed to reach metamorphosis were not significantly harder hit than those with non-feeding larval development. Our results indicate that nutrient supply was a crucial factor in driving K/T-boundary extinctions, with selection more strongly focused on benthic adult than on larval planktotrophic stages.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/32155 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:392:y:1998:i:6671:d:10.1038_32155

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/32155

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().