Elisabeth Vrba obituary: palaeontologist who solved a problem that vexed Darwin

Elisabeth Vrba’s meticulous studies of fossil and living mammals challenged the conventional view of evolution. Instead of a process of slow, continuous adaptive changes driven by natural selection, she linked episodes of rapid species extinction and formation to cataclysmic events in the environment. She is best known as a rigorous and creative contributor to the development of macroevolutionary theory — the origin and evolutionary fates of species and higher groups. She has died aged 82.  More