Sudden, Gradual, or Stepwise? Expanding the Null Hypothesis in Tests of Mass Extinctions
Steve C. Wang
Due to the Signor-Lipps effect, a simultaneous extinction of a
collection of taxa may appear gradual in the fossil record. Several methods
have been proposed that account for the incompleteness of the fossil record
when testing whether a collection of taxa went extinct simultaneously.
However, we may be interested in testing other patterns of extinction in
addition to a simultaneous extinction of all taxa. For instance, we may
hypothesize that an extinction occurred gradually, or in several pulses.
Here we introduce a statistical method for testing whether any arbitrary
extinction scenario is consistent wit
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