An artificial intelligence model trained on fossils, not texts, could rewrite the history of Earth's mass extinctions. Palaeontologists who developed OneStrata say it reconstructs changes in biodiversity over hundreds of millions of years with a detail that was previously impossible.
The logic mirrors large language models such as ChatGPT: the system learns statistical patterns and predicts what is most likely. Here, however, the words are replaced by the depths at which fossils occur in sedimentary rock layers, a discipline known as stratigraphy. The depth at which a species appears indicates when it was deposited, and combining sequences from thousands of sites is an enormous computational task.
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Until now, to make this manageable, stratigraphers grouped fossils into intervals of millions of years, a blurred view that hid faster changes. Shuzhong Shen, a palaeontologist at Nanjing University, has spent two decades building a vast database of fossils and geological data, with millions of specimens from tens of thousands of sites. In 2020 he and his colleagues estimated the appearance and extinction of species with a resolution of 26,000 years, reconstructing a timeline for 11,000 marine species over about 300 million years.
The next step was taken by a group at the Zhejiang Lab, an AI-focused research institution in Hangzhou. Training a model on that data produced OneStrata, which predicts when a fossil was most likely deposited. According to its developers, the result suggests that three of the "Big Five" mass extinctions were gradual declines in biodiversity rather than the sudden cataclysms described by other reconstructions.
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Other scientists are more cautious. Matthew Clapham, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, acknowledges that it is the most detailed global record so far, but notes that high-resolution reconstructions already exist for specific locations, including many that shed light on mass extinctions. "We could do some extra things with it, but I don't know if it would be Earth shattering," he says.
The model was presented on 12 October at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver. Its weight will depend on whether it holds up against local observations.
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