How Has Biodiversity Changed Over Millions of Years?

Why has biodiversity decreased over the past 20 million years? Why did large mammals, such as giant sloths, tapirs, and mammoths, go extinct at the end of the last ice age, some 50,000 to 10,000 years ago? Why are there many fewer mammal species today than there “should be”?

In this episode, we speak with Prof. Susanne Fritz, research group head at iDiv and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, about biodiversity change over very long time scales. She shares insights into how past extinction events shaped today’s ecosystems — and what that might mean for the future.

“Maybe we’re still in kind of the recovery from this extinction, maybe there is speciation ongoing, if we let it run for long enough, there would be large mammals again”, says Prof. Fritz.

Join us for a fascinating conversation about evolutionary history and biodiversity change over very long time scales, and what lessons we might be able to draw from the past and apply when looking at biodiversity today.

Related links:

Prof. Dr. Susanne Fritz at iDiv:
https://www.idiv.de/staff/susanne-fritz/

Paper on mammalian diversity change:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1602145113

Paper on past mammalian body size change:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/geb.13594

Paper on bird migration:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.6729

Paper on future bird diversity change:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.2184

Host: Dr. Volker Hahn, Head of Media and Communications at iDiv
Postproduction: Leven Wortmann