Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS
Volume 102, Issue 3, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.038103
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Funding
- NSF [DMR0535503]
- Santa Fe Institute.
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We present a quantitative model for the biological evolution of species body masses within large groups of related species, e.g., terrestrial mammals, in which body mass M evolves according to branching (speciation), multiplicative diffusion, and an extinction probability that increases logarithmically with mass. We describe this evolution in terms of a convection-diffusion-reaction equation for lnM. The steady-state behavior is in good agreement with empirical data on recent terrestrial mammals, and the time-dependent behavior also agrees with data on extinct mammal species between 95-50 Myr ago.
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