YOU might think that surviving a mass extinction was something worth celebrating, but the worst wouldn’t necessarily be over.
Many survivors of a mass extinction prosper by filling niches vacated by the victims, as birds and mammals did after the death of the dinosaurs. But after studying records of marine invertebrate fossils, David Jablonski of the University of Chicago has confirmed earlier suspicions that the survivors have a significantly higher risk of going extinct in the few million years after a mass extinction than in the geological stage before, even in groups where many species had survived (Proceedings of the…
