The redshift dependence of the abundance of collapsed objects places strong constraints on cosmological models of structure formation .
We apply a recently proposed model describing the anisotropic collapse of inhomogeneous spatial domains .
Compared with the spherical top–hat model , this generic model leads to significantly more collapsed objects at high redshifts : at redshift one and on the scale of rich clusters a factor of 65 .
Furthermore , for a fixed normalization of the initial fluctuation spectrum ( \sigma _ { 8 } = 1 ) , we predict four times as much presently collapsed objects on the mass–scale of rich clusters within the standard CDM cosmogony , compared to the spherical collapse .