Blurry Catastrophes

Abstract

Extinction events range from those that remove a single population from a local habitat to those megacatastrophes that obliterate tens of thousands of species over continents or oceans. When considering megacatastrophes, and especially whether a particular fossil cnronology documents one of the latter, catastrophes are generally viewed as short-term events with snorHerm direct consequences: the catastrophe occurs, species go extinct, and ambient conditions rapidly return to "normal" (after which the survivors spread, multiply, re-radiate, etc.). However, the pre-catastrophe presence of widespread species may blur our perception of a catastrophic event, since their resultant extinctions may occur hundreds to thousands of years after the event. Such a paleoscenario is relevant to the contemporary scene in tropical conservation biology; we are currently being deceived by the same blurry perception.