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. 2023 Aug 4;13:12663. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-39716-z

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© The Author(s) 2023

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Phanerozoic biodiversity curves. (a) Total Phanerozoic diversity based on raw data⁸² divided into its three main Evolutionary Faunas (EF), i.e. the Cambrian trilobites, the Paleozoic brachiopods, and the modern gastropods. These are three distinct types of fauna whose diversity pattern expanded and contracted in a similar fashion throughout the different phases of the Phanerozoic. Each EF includes specific taxonomic classes that were most abundant during (but not limited to) a certain period in Earth’s history. Furthermore, the EFs successively replaced one another as the principal group throughout the Phanerozoic. The red arrows represent the Big Five mass extinction events, including the Ordovician–Silurian extinction (~ 445 Ma ago), Devonian extinction (~ 375 Ma ago), Permian–Triassic extinction (~ 250 Ma ago), Triassic-Jurassic extinction (~ 200 Ma ago) and the Cretaceous-tertiary extinction (~ 66 Ma ago)⁸¹. (b) Corrected biodiversity curve using the shareholder quorum subsampling (SQS) sample standardization method³⁴.