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Marine plankton communities changed long before extinctions - EurekAlert


<p>For hundreds of millions of years, the oceans have teemed with single-celled organisms called foraminifera, hard-shelled, microscopic creatures at the bottom of the food chain. The fossil record of these primordial specks offers clues into future changes in global biodiversity, related to our warming climate. &nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Using a high-resolution global dataset of planktonic foraminifera fossils that&rsquo;s among the richest biological archives available to science, researchers have found that major environmental stress events leading to mass extinctions are reliably preceded by subtle changes in how a biological community is composed, acting as a pre-extinction early warning signal.</p>

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