ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Flat latitudinal diversity gradient caused by the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Rapid riparian ecosystem recovery in low-latitudinal North China following the end-Permian mass extinction.eLife · 2026Article
- The timing and nature of marine ecosystem recovery following the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.npj biodiversity · 2026Review
- Tetrapod species-area relationships across the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Physiology and climate change explain unusually high similarity across marine communities after end-Permian mass extinction.Science advances · 2025Article
- Deep time evolution of the Latitudinal Diversity Gradient: Insights from mechanistic models.PloS one · 2025Article
- DeepDive: estimating global biodiversity patterns through time using deep learning.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The great catastrophe: causes of the Permo-Triassic marine mass extinction.National science review · 2024Review
- Impact of global climate cooling on Ordovician marine biodiversity.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Why the Early Paleozoic was intrinsically prone to marine extinction.Science advances · 2023Article
- Tropical biodiversity linked to polar climate.Nature · 2023Article
- Learning from the past: opportunities for advancing ecological research and practice using palaeoecological data.Oecologia · 2022Review
- Global diversity dynamics in the fossil record are regionally heterogeneous.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Increase in marine provinciality over the last 250 million years governed more by climate change than plate tectonics.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Global warming is causing a more pronounced dip in marine species richness around the equator.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Truncated bimodal latitudinal diversity gradient in early Paleozoic phytoplankton.Science advances · 2021Article
- Spatial sampling heterogeneity limits the detectability of deep time latitudinal biodiversity gradients.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Flat latitudinal diversity gradient caused by the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- A deep-time perspective on the latitudinal diversity gradient.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG) is recognized as one of the most pervasive, global patterns of present-day biodiversity. However, the controlling mechanisms have proved difficult to identify because many potential drivers covary in space. The geological record presents a unique opportunity for understanding the mechanisms which drive the LDG by providing a direct window to deep-time biogeographic dynamics. Here we used a comprehensive database containing 52,318 occurrences of marine fossils to show that the shape of the LDG changed greatly during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction from showing a significant tropical peak to a flattened LDG. The flat LDG lasted for the entire Early Triassic (∼5 My) before reverting to a modern-like shape in the Middle Triassic. The environmental extremes that prevailed globally, especially the dramatic warming, likely induced selective extinction in low latitudes and accumulation of diversity in high latitudes through origination and poleward migration, which combined together account for the flat LDG of the Early Triassic.
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