Timeline of Speciation and Respeciation

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The fourth section of the model I would like to look at is the historical timeline. The original kinds appeared approximately 6,000 years ago and later suffered an aquatic extinction event about 4,500 years ago. Because of changing environments, speciation occurred rapidly at that time. Due to relative consistency of habitats today, speciation has slowed drastically.

Aquatic extinction events, on any scale, tend to produce fossils due to rapid death and burial. It is expected that during the major event 4,500 years ago, most of the fossil found today were layed down. The fossil record contains a large species diversity in comparison to the morphological disparity when contrasted with extant plants and animals, suggesting an amazing amount of variation was possible compared to today.

Many varieties of modern plants and animals are found in large sizes in the fossil record. These are predicted to have existed before the extinction event and show how environments (such as atmospheric conditions) have changed. Just as the lifespan of people dropped dramatically after this event, similar probably occurred with plants and animals.

Speciation and Re-Speciation

In the computer generated bird kind, the original computer bird appeared on earth about 6,000 years ago and speciation began and continued until a major extinction event occurred about 4,500 years ago. We do not know what the surface features of those species looked like, but we have the fossils to recognize the form has not changed. During the extinction event, a limited amount of the kind survived. Afterwords, speciation began again in the newly formed habitats and has continued until today.

As mentioned earlier, rapid diversification or speciation within the kinds would be expected after this event because the entire world was now a large landscape of new environments. The emerging animals would migrate and acclimate. It would happen rapidly as every generation would see breeds forming within their kinds and the genetic reaction was able to use already existing genes rather than developing new ones.

This page is under construction. My apologies for any misspellings, repeated text, missing references, etc. Please visit again later for a more complete treatment of this topic.