Evolutionary model of species body mass diversification.
We present a quantitative model for the biological evolution of species body masses within large groups of related species, e.g., terrestrial mammals, in which body mass M evolves according to branching (speciation), multiplicative diffusion, and an extinction probability that increases logarithmically with mass. We describe this evolution in terms of a convection-diffusion-reaction equation for lnM. The steady-state behavior is in good agreement with empirical data on recent terrestrial mammals, and the time-dependent behavior also agrees with data on extinct mammal species between 95-50 Myr ago.
Clauset
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Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501, USA. aaronc@santafe.edu
Redner
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D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D049628:Body Size / Q000502:physiology*; D008957:Models, Genetic