GOBE - Definition Concept Duration

I read yet another paper about the Ordovician period:

The Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event (GOBE): definition, concept and duration by Thomas Servais and David A.T. Harper, Lethaia, vol 51, pp 151-164

There is a PDF of it.

Unlike Understanding the Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event, this appears to be a summary of what’s known about GOBE, and what positions paleontologists take about it. The authors don’t espouse any particular view of GOBE (of which there are many), it tries to define it. They point out that as many as three separate biodiversity events happened, and that they happened at different times depending on the paleogeography.

This is a more nuanced version of a steady increase in biodiversity than Sepkoski’s biodiversity curve, which is good: this seems like a paper for specialists.

The almost three page bibliography is almost more valuable than the text. Servais and Harper collected all that was to be known about GOBE in 2017 in their bibliography. Servais and Harper only touch on the end-Ordovician extinction, but some of the papers in the bibliography cover it.