work of Mike Benton<\/a>, a professor of palaeontology at the University of Bristol, UK, has been at the heart of transforming palaeobiology from a speculative subject into testable science. As the scale of global climate change emerges, along with its impact on life on Earth, palaeontologists\u2019 understanding of past extinction events has come to the fore.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn part, Mike\u2019s work builds on the climate models that have been developed for use in the present. \u201cNow that we have functioning climate models for the present day that capture at least some of the complexity of the way the world works, we can use them to look at the effects of small-scale historical changes in climate,\u201d he explains. \u201cTake the aridification of North Africa since Roman times as one example. We can look at what that meant for movements of wildlife. We know that there were hippos and ostriches in Egypt a thousand years ago, and that they aren\u2019t there any more. That\u2019s the kind of thing we can track.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mike\u2019s work is also able to harness a similar approach to delve much further into the past. \u201cWe can go deeper in time. We use the same approaches that we know work in the present day. We\u2019re careful to constantly road-test the models against the present day, and ensure they\u2019re making reasonable predictions. Then we apply them to the past.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Exploring the history of biodiversity fluctuations on Earth means harnessing the latest technology. Advances in computational approaches and data accessibility have allowed the creation of far more sophisticated models. \u201cThe precision of what we can do is getting better all the time, meaning that the error bars are getting smaller,\u201d says Mike. \u201cAn obvious example of this is the dating of rocks. When I started out many years ago, dating rocks involved an error bar of plus or minus five per cent, even 10 per cent. Now in some cases it\u2019s plus or minus a fraction of one per cent, which is pretty amazing. We can also take many more measurements from the rocks, for example chemical measurements like the abundance of isotopes of oxygen and carbon, which can tell us much more about climates and atmospheres. We can be much more confident in the quality of the data now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a result, gaps in our knowledge are being bridged, and a clearer picture is emerging. \u201cMany people are familiar with the extinction of the moas, and of course the dodo. But what we\u2019re looking at is potential events over the next few centuries that are much bigger and more serious than anything like that. It\u2019s something quite different from the extinction of the dodo, or a few species here and there. What we\u2019re looking at is losses of tens of per cent. Perhaps thirty, forty, fifty per cent of biodiversity. It\u2019s by looking back at the deep time mass extinctions that we can find sources of data that allow us to project into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n