8. The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event: Causes and Consequences
Organisers: David Harper & Thomas Servais
Organisers: David Harper & Thomas Servais
During an interval of some 25 million years, in the early and mid Ordovician, there was an explosion in diversity at the family, genus and species level unprecedented in the history of life. A new cast of players together consolidated a suspension-feeding benthos that was to survive for the next 200 million years before the ecosystem was destroyed by the end Permian extinction event. Recent diversity curves suggest that this was the Phanerozoic biodiversification.