Contents Marine Diversity Data
From J. John Scpkoski's record[1] of marine animal genera from the past 542 million years, researchers Robert Rohde and Richard Muller[2] extracted a time series, , of marine animal diversity. The pairs appear in a Web supplement to their article.[2] The first and last three terms of the series are \eqalignno{ & (-0.001,4115), (0.0, 4166), (1.8, 4063), \ldots, \cr & (532.0, 99), (534.0, 47), (538.0, 16).} Time is measured as millions of years ago (Myr), so (534.0, 47) means that the presently known fossils of marine animals that lived sometime between 538 and 534 Myr are grouped into 47 genera (47 is likely a small fraction of the number of genera actually present).
