ArticleEcology letters2020
A 450 million years long latitudinal gradient in age-dependent extinction.
Article in Ecology letters, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Survivorship Bias Explains Age-Dependent Extinction in Fossil Genera.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The fate of South America's endemic mammalian fauna in response to the most dramatic Cenozoic climate disruption.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- EutherianCoP. An integrated biotic and climate database for conservation paleobiology based on eutherian mammals.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Deep time evolution of the Latitudinal Diversity Gradient: Insights from mechanistic models.PloS one · 2025Article
- Toward a Semi-Supervised Learning Approach to Phylogenetic Estimation.Systematic biology · 2024Article
- Challenges in estimating species' age from phylogenetic trees.Global ecology and biogeography : a journal of macroecology · 2024Article
- Trait-mediated speciation and human-driven extinctions in proboscideans revealed by unsupervised Bayesian neural networks.Science advances · 2024Article
- DeepDive: estimating global biodiversity patterns through time using deep learning.Nature communications · 2024Article
- gen3sis: A general engine for eco-evolutionary simulations of the processes that shape Earth's biodiversity.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- The past and future human impact on mammalian diversity.Science advances · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Leigh Van Valen famously stated that under constant conditions extinction probability is independent of species age. To test this 'law of constant extinction', we developed a new method using deep learning to infer age-dependent extinction and analysed 450 myr of marine life across 21 invertebrate clades. We show that extinction rate significantly decreases with age in > 90% of the cases, indicating that most species died out soon after their appearance while those which survived experienced ever decreasing extinction risk. This age-dependent extinction pattern is stronger towards the Equator and holds true when the potential effects of mass extinctions and taxonomic inflation are accounted for. These results suggest that the effect of biological interactions on age-dependent extinction rate is more intense towards the tropics. We propose that the latitudinal diversity gradient and selection at the species level account for this exceptional, yet little recognised, macroevolutionary and macroecological pattern.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.