Saturday, August 05, 2006
PRL study wipes out myth on extinction
Ahmedabad, August 4: One always wonders why members of a particular species become extinct at the same time across the globe. The answer to this puzzle has been explained in a paper (Abstract) authored by two Indian scientists and published by the American Institute of Physics, as well as British website, Physics Web.
Dr R E Amritkar of Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, and Dr Govindan Rangarajan of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, have explained the puzzle with the help of a theory called Special Spatial Synchronisation.
They say that separated communities of the species synchronise together before becoming extinct.
Amritkar and Rangarajan say in the paper that animal populations all over the world are likely to synchronise their numbers before dying out. This is why, in the Cretaceous Tertiary period, the last period of mass extinction, about 65 million years ago, dinosaurs of the same species died out at the same time.
technorati tags: Ahmedabad, species, extinct, institute, physics, american, bangalore, special, spatial, synchronization, cretaceous, tertiary, mass, extinction, dinosaurs
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