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Abstract
Shiva, the destroyer in the Hindu pantheon of gods, could be the patron of paleontologists as they scrutinize the intricacies of past biodiversity crises. Yet Shiva's dance of destruction clears the way for rebirth and renewal; it is this creative side of Shiva to which paleontologists recently have appealed as they investigate the recovery processes that follow mass extinctions. One particularly abrupt mass extinction, at the end of the Cretaceous period, [HN1], [HN2] provides a clean starting point for examining recovery patterns. An influential study of this period from the Texas Gulf Coast (1) revealed a pattern that has become the paradigm of recovery (2): A zone barren of fossils immediately above the extinction horizon is overlain in the more recent strata by a species-poor assemblage of surviving taxa, usually able to survive broad environmental conditions, and opportunistic blooms of some species, presumably taking advantage of empty ecological niches. This survival interval is succeeded by the diversification of new species and eventual rebuilding of communities.
Published Version
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