Lauren Sallan: How to win at evolution and survive a mass extinction
לוריין סלן: איך לזכות באבולוציה ולשרוד הכחדה המונית
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
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greatest winners --
four billion years in the making.
כבר ארבעה מיליארד שנים.
who have ever lived,
of golden opportunities
of your co-winners and relatives.
who uses big data --
שמשתמשת בביג דאטה --
and others lose.
זוכים ואחרים מפסידים.
of beautiful fish fossils,
אין ספור מאובני דגים יפיפיים,
number of ugly, broken fossils,
של מאובנים שבורים ומכוערים,
for evolutionary patterns.
500 מליון שנה כדי למצוא תבניות אבולוציוניות.
major pathways of change
of the winners and losers
I discovered using fossil data.
שגיליתי בשימוש במידע מאובנים.
as the last dinosaur --
with razor-edge jaws dominated
with arm bones in their fins.
עם עצמות ידים בסנפירים שלהם.
across the sea floor.
of salmon and tuna
עם סנפיר הקרן של הסלמון והטונה
lived offshore in fear.
חיים רחוק מהחוף בפחד.
the tetrapods,
359 million years ago:
and swept away.
that's the end of the story.
the meek inherited the earth,
came from many groups --
to bottom-feeder,
over the next several million years
מה שהשורדים עשו במשך מליוני השנים הבאות
should have had an advantage.
and biding their time.
והמשיכו בדרכיהם הישנות.
sharks and four-legged tetrapods
כרישים וטטרפודים בעלי ארבע רגליים
dying young,
and reproducing rapidly.
and weird bodies.
for their 60,000 living species,
evolutionary pathways.
בדרכים אלטרנטיביות אבולוציונית.
repeat across time.
חזרו במשך הזמן.
upon thousands of dead fishes,
through mass extinction,
will not just replace what was lost,
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