Oceanographic controls on the diversity and extinction of planktonic foraminifera

Plate tectonics and climate change are shown to have driven the diversity and extinction of planktonic foraminifera throughout their evolutionary history. Evolution and environment The fossil record is not a simple representation of the comings and goings of living things. There are interactions between life and Earth-system processes, and in this paper, Shanan Peters et al . describe how plate tectonics and climate change have together driven the extinction of planktonic foraminifera in the Atlantic basin throughout its history, beginning in the Jurassic. Major crises such as the end-Cretaceous mass extinction leave an imprint superimposed on this background. These factors have not, however, influenced the origin of new foraminifera species. Understanding the links between long-term biological evolution, the ocean–atmosphere system and plate tectonics is a central goal of Earth science. Although environmental perturbations of many different kinds are known to have affected long-term biological evolution, particularly during major mass extinction events 1 , 2 , the relative importance of physical environmental factors versus biological interactions in governing rates of extinction and origination through geological time remains unknown 2 . Here we use macrostratigraphic data from the Atlantic Ocean basin to show that changes in global species diversity and rates of extinction among planktonic foraminifera have been linked to tectonically and climatically forced changes in ocean circulation and chemistry from the Jurassic period to the present. Transient environmental perturbations, such as those that occurred after the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period 1 approximately 66 million years ago, and the Eocene/Oligocene greenhouse–icehouse transition 3 , 4 approximately 34 million years ago, are superimposed on this general long-term relationship. Rates of species origination, by contrast, are not correlated with corresponding macrostratigraphic quantities, indicating that physiochemical changes in the ocean–atmosphere system affect evolution principally by driving the synchronous extinction of lineages that originated owing to more protracted and complex interactions between biological and environmental factors.