(11. Dezember 1983)

At a conference on mass extinctions, held in August at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Dr. Sepkoski said the timing of these events suggested that “there is indeed a statistically significant periodicity in the observed distribution of events of mass or accelerated extinction over the last 250 million years.“ Search for Answers

He confessed this “stumped“ him and Dr. Raup, saying: “We are aware of no documented process with a cycling time approximately 26 million years. But with that long a cycle, we suspect that the forcing agent will not be terrestrial but rather solar or galactic.“