Lauren Sallan: How to win at evolution and survive a mass extinction
Lauren Sallan: Cómo ganar en la evolución y sobrevivir a una extinción masiva
TED Fellow Lauren Sallan is a paleobiologist using big data analytics to reveal how macroevolution, or evolution happens at the largest scales, happens. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
que está creciendo,
greatest winners --
ganadores de la historia,
four billion years in the making.
de 4000 millones años en construcción.
who have ever lived,
inundaciones, asteroides,
de la selección natural.
of golden opportunities
a las oportunidades de oro
of your co-winners and relatives.
sus coganadores y familiares.
who uses big data --
que usa datos a gran escala,
and others lose.
ganan y otras pierden.
a los peces muertos?
of beautiful fish fossils,
una multitud de fósiles hermosos,
number of ugly, broken fossils,
el número mayor de fósiles feos y rotos,
for evolutionary patterns.
años en busca de patrones evolutivos.
captarse mediante coordenadas
major pathways of change
revelar grandes vías de cambio
los ganadores y perdedores
of the winners and losers
I discovered using fossil data.
que descubrí mediante datos fósiles.
as the last dinosaur --
del último dinosaurio,
with razor-edge jaws dominated
con mandíbulas de filo de navaja
with arm bones in their fins.
huesos de brazo en sus aletas.
across the sea floor.
en el fondo del mar.
of salmon and tuna
de salmón y atún
de la cadena alimenticia.
lived offshore in fear.
vivían en alta mar con miedo.
the tetrapods,
los tetrápodos,
de los ríos tropicales.
359 million years ago:
hace 359 millones de años:
and swept away.
interrumpido y barrido.
ese es el final de la historia.
that's the end of the story.
the meek inherited the earth,
los mansos heredaron la tierra,
came from many groups --
vinieron de muchos grupos,
por sus propios muertos.
principales hasta el alimentador inferior,
to bottom-feeder,
over the next several million years
qué hicieron los sobrevivientes
en ese mundo devastado.
should have had an advantage.
tenían una ventaja.
and biding their time.
había funcionado y esperando su momento.
sharks and four-legged tetrapods
y tetrápodos de cuatro patas
dying young,
and reproducing rapidly.
y reproduciéndose rápidamente.
and weird bodies.
proliferaron,
for their 60,000 living species,
para sus 60 000 especies vivientes,
evolutionary pathways.
fueron a por alternativas,
en peces muertos andantes.
repeat across time.
y la derrota se repite en el tiempo.
upon thousands of dead fishes,
y miles de peces muertos,
through mass extinction,
antepasados de la extinción masiva,
will not just replace what was lost,
no solo reemplazará lo que se perdió,
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Lauren Sallan - PaleobiologistTED Fellow Lauren Sallan is a paleobiologist using big data analytics to reveal how macroevolution, or evolution happens at the largest scales, happens.
Why you should listen
Lauren Sallan uses the vast fossil record of fishes as a deep time database, mining to find out why some species persist and diversify while others die off. She has used these methods to discover the lost, largest, "sixth" mass extinction of vertebrates; the end-Devonian Hangenberg event (359 million years ago), reveal how fish heads changed first during their rise to dominance; test why some species thrive after global disruptions while others flounder; and show how invasions by new predators can shift prey diversity at global scales.
Sallan is the Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, based in the Department Earth and Environmental Science, and became a TED Fellow in 2017. Her research has been published in Science, PNAS and Current Biology. It has also been featured in the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Forbes, the New Scientist, the Discovery Channel and the recent popular science book, The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen.
Lauren Sallan | Speaker | TED.com