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Are Mass Extinctions Really Periodic?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2009

Sheldon M. Ross
Sheldon M. Ross
Affiliation:
Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations ResearchUniversity of California Berkeley, California
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Abstract

It is argued that the analysis of family extinction data that resulted in the claim of a 26-Myr periodicity of mass extinctions was flawed in that it did not allow for the possibility of a symmetric random walk model, which is shown to be perfectly consistent with the data.

Type
Articles
Information
Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , January 1987 , pp. 61 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

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