Are Mass Extinctions Really Periodic?

Abstract

It is argued that the analysis of family extinction data that resulted in the claim of a 26 Myr periodicity of mass extinctions was flawed in that it did not allow for the possibility of a symmetric random walk model, which is shown to be perfectly consistent with the data. (Author)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 1986
Accession Number
ADA174290

Entities

People

  • Sheldon M. Ross

Organizations

  • University of California, Berkeley

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • California
  • Classification
  • Engineering
  • Extinction
  • Goodness Of Fit Tests
  • Industrial Engineering
  • Operations Research
  • Periodic Variations
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Random Variables
  • Random Walk
  • Security
  • Statistical Analysis
  • United States
  • Universities

Fields of Study

  • Psychology

Readers

  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Polar and Arctic Studies
  • Strategic Security Studies