Overview
- Researchers analyzed more than 300,000 fossils from over 12,000 marine invertebrate genera alongside paleogeographic reconstructions to test how coastline geometry affected extinction risk.
- East–west coastlines, islands and inland seaways functioned as “latitudinal traps,” elevating extinction risk compared with north–south shores that allowed species to track suitable temperatures.
- The coastline effect intensified during mass extinctions and hyperthermal intervals, indicating paleogeography became more consequential under severe climate stress.
- The study, led by the University of Oxford with collaborators at UC Berkeley, Stanford, the University of Leeds and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, was published Jan. 15 in Science (DOI 10.1126/science.adv2627).
- Authors propose testing for the same pattern in living systems and note that present-day populations on east–west coasts or isolated habitats, such as the Mediterranean or Gulf of Mexico, could face higher risk under human-driven warming.