title: Evolutionary model of species body mass diversification.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501, USA. aaronc@santafe.edu
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Clauset
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Redner
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D049628:Body Size / Q000502:physiology*; D008957:Models, Genetic