|UCB Physics in the News| |Colloquia & Seminars| |Honors &
Awards| |Physics in the News| |Title:||Mass extinction comes
every 62 million years, UC physicists discover| |Editor:||David
Perlman. Chronicle Science Editor| |Extended Text:||With
surprising and mysterious regularity, life on Earth has
flourished and vanished in cycles of mass extinction every 62
million years, say two UC Berkeley scientists who discovered the
pattern after a painstaking computer study of fossil records
going back for more than 500 million years. Their findings are
certain to generate a renewed burst of speculation among
scientists who study the history and evolution of life. Each
period of abundant life and each mass extinction has itself
covered at least a few million years -- and the trend of
biodiversity has been rising steadily ever since the last mass
extinction, when dinosaurs and millions of other life forms went
extinct about 65 million years ago. The Berkeley researchers are
physicists, not biologists or geologists or pale