Biodiversity on land and in the sea

Abstract Life on land today is as much as 25 times as diverse as life in the sea. Paradoxically, this extraordinarily high level of continental biodiversity has been achieved in a shorter time and it occupies a much smaller area of the Earth's surface than does marine biodiversity. Raw palaeontological data suggest very different models for the diversification of life on land and in the sea. The well‐studied marine fossil record appears to show evidence for an equilibrium model of diversification, with phases of rapid radiation, followed by plateaux that may indicate times of equilibrium diversity. The continental fossil record shows exponential diversification from the Silurian to the present. These differences appear to be real: the continental fossil record is unlikely to be so poor that all evidence for a high initial equilibrial diversity has been lost. In addition, it is not clear that the apparently equilibrial marine model is correct, since it is founded on studies at familial level. At species level, a logistic family‐level curve probably breaks down to an exponential. The rocketing diversification rates of flowering plants, insects, and other land life are evidently hugely different from the more sluggish rates of diversification of life in the sea, perhaps as a result of greater endemism and habitat complexity on land. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.