Coevolution between Terrestrial Ecosystem and Earth Environment

Coevolution between terrestrial ecosystem and Earth environment is a hot research topic in both biology and geology. Last progresses in these field are reported from following research subjects: evolution of jawed vertebrates(gnathostomata) from Silurian; occurrence of earliest forests from Devonian of Xinjiang; biodiversity of insects in amber from Cretaceous of Myanmar; Evolution of primates and geochemistry studies from Eocene/Oligocene; studies of Longdan fauna from Lingxia basin, Gansu Province of earlier Pleistocene and endemic cloven-breast fishes from Pliocene Tibet; the correlations thick-boned fish,Hsianwenia wui, and the aridification of the Qaidam Basin; monsoon climate and its impact on biodiversity; study on the flora from Mankang, Tibet of Miocene and its palaeoclimate; depositional environment and its impact on the preservation of fossils; contraction of high resolution Stratigraphic series by using data of paleomagnetism and mammal fossils.     

Simple lattice model of macroevolution

In future astrobiology, like in modern astrophysics, the numerical simulations can be a very important tool for proving theories. In this paper, I propose a simple lattice model of a multi-species ecosystem suitable for the study of emergent properties of macroevolution. Unlike the majority of ecological models, the number of species is not fixed—they emerge by “mutation” of existing species, then survive or go extinct depending on the balance between local ecological interactions. The Monte-Carlo numerical simulations show that this model is able to qualitatively reproduce phenomena that have been empirically observed, like the dependence between size of the isolated area and the number of species inhabiting there, primary production and species-diversity. The model allows also studying the causes of mass extinctions and more generally, repeatability, and the role of pure chance in macroevolution.