If you looked up 66 million years ago you might have seen, for a split second, a bright light as a mountain-sized asteroid burned through the atmosphere and smashed into Earth.
My colleague Santiago Ramírez-Barahona, from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and I took a new approach to solving this confusion in a study wein Biology Letters. We analysed large angiosperm family trees, which previous work mapped from mutations in DNA sequences from 33,000-73,000 species.
The extinction rate of a lineage, in this case angiosperms, can be estimated using mathematical models. The one we used compared ancestor age with estimates for how many species should be appearing in a family tree according to what we know about the evolution process. The model generates time bands, such as a million years, to show how extinction rate varies through time. And the model allowed us to identify time periods that had high extinction rates.
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