East Bay Science Cafe: Mass Extinctions: Learning from the fossil record

Mass extinctions â€" episodes during which many groups of previously successful organisms disappeared from Earth in a geologically short timespan â€" are one of the most striking and earliest recognized features of the fossil record. As the modern biodiversity crisis unfolds, scientists are increasingly turning to these events to understand the relationship between environmental changes and biodiversity losses. Yet despite decades of study, many questions about the causes and consequences of mass extinctions remain open.
Dr. Seth Finnegan will talk about the history of thinking about mass extinctions, the different kinds of information that paleontologists and geologists draw on to understand them, and some of the current debates surrounding them. He will touch on several major events, including his work on the first major mass extinction: the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction, 445 million years ago.