Delayed biological recovery from extinctions throughout the fossil record

How quickly does biodiversity rebound after extinctions? Palaeobiologists h ave examined the temporal, taxonomic and geographic patterns of recovery fo llowing individual mass extinctions in detail(1-5), but have not analysed r ecoveries from extinctions throughout the fossil record as a whole. Here, w e measure how fast biodiversity rebounds after extinctions in general, rath er than after individual mass extinctions, by calculating the cross-correla tion between extinction and origination rates across the entire Phanerozoic marine fossil record. Our results show that extinction rates are not signi ficantly correlated with contemporaneous origination rates, but instead are correlated with origination rates roughly 10 million years later. This lag ged correlation persists when we remove the 'Big Five' major mass extinctio ns, indicating that recovery times following mass extinctions and backgroun d extinctions are similar. Our results suggest that there are intrinsic lim its to how quickly global biodiversity can recover after extinction events, regardless of their magnitude. They also imply that today's anthropogenic extinctions will diminish biodiversity for millions of years to come.