  In this paper I describe a cellular automaton model of a multi-species
ecosystem, suitable for the study of emergent properties of macroevolution.
Unlike majority of ecological models, the number of coexisting species is not
fixed. Starting from one common ancestor they appear by "mutations" of existent
species, and then survive or extinct depending on the balance of local
ecological interactions. Monte-Carlo numerical simulations show that this model
is able to qualitatively reproduce phenomena that have been observed in other
models and in nature.
