| Evolutionary Model of Species Body Mass Diversification (2008) | |||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||
| We present a quantitative model for the biological evolution of species body masses within large groups of related species, e.g., terrestrial mammals, in which body mass M evolves according to branching (speciation), multiplicative diffusion, and an extinction probability that increases logarithmically with mass. We describe this evolution in terms of a convection-diffusion-reaction equation for ln M. The steady-state behavior is in good agreement with empirical data on recent terrestrial mammals, and the time-dependent behavior also agrees with data on extinct mammal species between 95 - 50 Myr ago.. Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures | |||||||||
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