New paper by lab graduate students on latitudinal diversity gradient

Historical Geobiology graduate students Tom Boag and Rich Stockey, along with Payne group member Will Gearty (all co-first authors) have published a paper in Current Biology looking at the relationship between global temperatures and the latitudinal diversity gradient. A news article on the paper can be found here. In the modern ocean, the highest diversity is found in the tropics. However, this paper finds that during warmer intervals in Earth history, diversity was lower in the tropics and higher in mid-latitudes. This is likely due to temperature-dependent hypoxia responses in hot tropical oceans, and suggests that tropical areas will be vulnerable to diversity loss due to modern global warming. The paper can be found here.