A simple model of biological evolution of community food webs is introduced. This modelis based on the niche model, which is known to generate model food webs that are verysimilar to empirical food webs. The networks evolve by speciation and extinction.Co-extinctions due to the loss of all prey species are found to play a major role indetermining the longterm shape of the food webs. The central aim is to design the modelsuch that the characteristic parameters of the niche model food webs remain in realisticintervals. When the mutation rule is chosen accordingly, it is found that food webs with acomplex, biologically meaningful structure emerge and that the statistics of extinctionevents agrees well with that observed in the paleontological data.
