March 4, 2010
For Immediate Release
For more information: Dan Stephen (801) 863-8584
University Marketing & Communications: Erin Spurgeon, (801) 863-6807
Written by: Chelsey Richardson (801) 863-8504
Thanks to Jonathan Swift’s island of Lilliput, a strange place occupied by tiny beings, the word has entered into common parlance to denote something below average size. Paleontologists have adopted the literary term to describe a biological occurrence, now commonly referred to as The Lilliput Effect. The Lilliput Effect is a phenomenon that apparently occurs after a mass extinction on Earth, traumatizing the surviving marine life and reducing their overall size – an event that would take several million years to recover from. However, a UVU professor is part of an international team of French, German, American and Swiss paleontologists that have discovered that this may not be the case. The team’s results, published in the February 2010 issue of the journal “Geology,” have challenged paleontologists’ current thinking regarding the way the Earth functions in the aftermath of a mass extinction event.
Dan Stephen, assistant professor of earth sciences at UVU, was working with the team in the west desert of Utah when they came across something strange: outsized fossils of gastropods.
“We pretty literally stumbled on these giant snails,” Stephen said. “We weren’t really looking for them, but they caught our attention. ‘Giant’ is really a relative term – they may not giant by common standards, but relatively speaking they are pretty large, considering how early they are.”
The giant snail fossils were seven centimeters long.
Over the last 540 million years, roughly 20 mass extinctions have succeeded one another. The most devastating of these, the Permian-Triassic (P-T) mass extinction occurred 252.6 million years ago. The uncovered gastropods date from only one million years after the P-T mass extinction, thus making the seven centimeters surprisingly long – much longer than would be expected so soon after such a major environmental upset.
The paleontologists believe this discovery may refute the existence of a Lilliput Effect on marine organisms, or at the very least might suggest that its importance has been overestimated. The researchers plan to continue to study the fossils discovered in Utah while searching for other species and groups to confirm these new data. However, these findings already suggest that paleontologists are going to have to re-think the immediate and long-term impact of mass extinctions on species.
“You know, for the general public I don’t think it’s probably that exciting,” Stephen said. “But for paleontologists, it’s pretty cool.”
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