The journal "Science" has published in the issue of the 1st of August the results of a detailed research work about the evolution of marine diversity all through the last 50 million years. The study has been carried out with the participation of scientists from Australia, Spain, USA, UK, Holland, Malaysia and Panama.

It took a decade of painstaking study, the cooperation of hundreds of researchers, and a database of more than 200,000 fossil records, but John Alroy thinks he's disproved much of the conventional wisdom about the diversity of marine fossils and extinction rates.