Jack Sepkoski

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Joseph John "Jack" Sepkoski (born July 26, 1948 in Presque Isle , Maine , † May 1, 1999 in Chicago , Illinois ) was an American paleontologist .

Life

Sepkoski studied at the University of Notre Dame , where he received his bachelor's degree magnum cum laude in 1970 and received his PhD in geology from Harvard University in 1977 with Stephen Jay Gould . The subject of the dissertation was the geology and paleontology of the Black Hills in South Dakota . From 1974 he taught at the University of Rochester and from 1978 at the University of Chicago , where he was Associate Professor in 1982 and Professor in 1986. He was also at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He died of heart failure due to high blood pressure in his Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago .

Sepkoski compiled extensive global lists of families and genera of fossil marine fauna with the aim of identifying evolutionary patterns. In 1981, from an analysis of 2,800 families, he found three large fauna classes, which gradually replaced each other in evolution: a Cambrian, dominated by trilobites , a Paleozoic, dominated by brachiopods (with the highest point in the Ordovician ), and a modern fauna, which after the mass extinction in the Permian and is dominated by molluscs. Together with his Chicago colleague David M. Raup , he believed to have discovered a cycle of 26 million years in the extinction rates. The nemesis hypothesis was set up as an attempt to explain it .

In 1983 he received the Charles Schuchert Award from the Paleontological Society , of which he was president from 1995 to 1996. He was a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. From 1983 to 1986 he was co-editor of the journal Paleobiology .

He was married and had a son.

literature

  • Michael Ruse: Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? , Harvard University Press 1999, with a chapter on Sepkoski
  • David Sepkoski: Stephen Jay Gould, Jack Sepkoski and the quantitative revolution in American Paleobiology , Journal of the History of Biology, Volume 38, 2005, p. 209

Fonts

  • Raup, Sepkoski Mass extinctions in the fossil marine record , Science, Volume 215, 1982, p. 1501, abstract (statistical support for four major mass extinctions in the Ordovician, Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous)
  • Raup, Sepkoski The role of extinction in evolution , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Vol. 91, 1994, p. 6758, pdf
  • A kinetic model of phanerozoic taxonomic diversity , part 1-3, Paleobiology, Volume 4, 1978, pp. 223-251, Volume 5, 1979, pp. 222-251, Volume 10, 1984, pp. 246-267
  • Alpha, beta, gamma, or where does all the diversity go? , Paleobiology, Vol. 14, 1988, pp. 221-234
  • Patterns of Phanerozoic extinction: a perspective from global data bases . In OH Walliser (Ed.) Global Events and Event Stratigraphy , Springer Verlag, 1996, pp. 35–51
  • A compendium of fossil marine animal genera , Bulletins of American Paleontology, Volume 364, 2002, Paleontological Research Institution, Ithaca (New York)
  • with Raup, Richard Bambach, James W. Valentine Phanerozoic marine diversity and the fossil record , Nature, Volume 293, 1981, pp. 435-437

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary at the University of Chicago 1999
  2. ↑ Sepkoski A factor analytic description of the Phanerozoic marine fossil record , Paleobiology, Volume 7, 1981, pp. 36-53, first page at jstor
  3. ^ Raub, Sepkoski Periodicity of extinctions in the geological past , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Vol. 81, 1984, p. 801, pdf

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Sepkoski, Jack
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sepkoski, Joseph John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 26, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Presque Isle , Maine
DATE OF DEATH May 1, 1999
Place of death Chicago , Illinois