Periodicity of mass extinctions without an extraterrestrial cause

TL;DR

This paper presents a lattice model of prey-predator ecosystems showing natural long-period oscillations in species extinctions, suggesting Earth's extinction periodicity arises from internal dynamics rather than extraterrestrial influences.

Contribution

It introduces a novel lattice prey-predator model demonstrating intrinsic causes for extinction periodicity, challenging extraterrestrial hypotheses.

Findings

Model exhibits irregular long-period oscillations at low mutation rates.

Extinction periodicity emerges naturally from ecosystem dynamics.

Results support internal ecosystem processes as drivers of extinction cycles.

Abstract

We study a lattice model of a multi-species prey-predator system. Numerical results show that for a small mutation rate the model develops irregular long-period oscillatory behavior with sizeable changes in a number of species. The periodicity of extinctions on Earth was suggested by Raup and Sepkoski but so far is lacking a satisfactory explanation. Our model indicates that this is a natural consequence of the ecosystem dynamics, not the result of any extraterrestrial cause.