Abstract
BIOLOGISTS have long been interested in the dynamics of living populations of animals, but for obvious reasons they have been less concerned with the nature of the resulting dead populations. Recently, palaeontologists1,2 have begun to investigate the dynamics of living populations and their transformation into fossil communities. It is now possible to complement these studies with mathematical models which define the form of a stable living population and its accumulating fossil counterpart. The processes of recruitment, growth, seasonality and mortality have been programmed for an ‘IBM 7094’ computer and the output expressed in terms of age-frequency and size-frequency for the living and resulting dead populations.
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References
Olson, E. C., J. Geol., 65, 309 (1957).
Craig, G. Y., and Hallam, A., Palaeontology, 6, 731 (1963).
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CRAIG, G., OERTEL, G. Models of Living and Fossil Populations of Animals Generated by a Computer. Nature 210, 438–439 (1966). https://doi.org/10.1038/210438a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/210438a0
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