And that's because we're going to say the fossil record is biased. And by that, we just mean that certain organisms are more or less likely to be represented in that fossil record. So we're going to look at here
The fossil record is our only empirical sample of past biodiversity, providing a critical resource for understanding macroevolutionary and macroecological processes in deep time1. Numerous abiotic and biological drivers have been proposed to explain apparent patterns of fossil diversity2, but it has lon...
54,55,56). While the fossil record for early eukaryotes is sparse and difficult to distinguish from prokaryotes, there is evidence for early eukaryotes in non-marine or low-salinity environments from at least 1 billion years ago55. Furthermore, other key early eukaryotic innovations, such ...
Over the last three decades, the fossil record of spiders has increased from being previously biased towards Tertiary ambers and a few dubious earlier records, to one which reveals a much greater diversity in the Mesozoic, with many of the modern families present in that era, and with clearer...
Either way, there is no more reason to think that ctenophores are more similar to the most recent common ancestor of animals than are any other living animals [50]. Learning about ctenophores from the fossil record is challenging, because ctenophores preserve so poorly. Most of the fossils ...
The simplest, and perhaps most cited, type of biodiversity loss is global extinction (see Box 4.1). Global extinctions occur when the last individual of a species has died. While we may remain unaware of the current global extinction risk of many marine species, the fossil record can provide...
For the last 50-years we were warned repeatedly over and over and over again by expert scientists that this extinction event would indeed happen if we did not diminish then rid ourselves of fossil fuel addiction. It might now be too late to save ourselves from ourselves, save our ecosystems...
A frequent argument against macroevolution is that there is insufficient evidence to warrant the conclusions made about major evolutionary transitions—that transitional links and intermediate forms do not exist in the fossil record and the proposed mechanisms are incapable of effecting such changes. Creati...
We removed all records with BasisOfRecord = “fossil specimen,”“machine observation,” or “unknown.” For time, we decided to use “day” as a unit of effort. We isolated data on day, month, and year, and filtered data records to remove any months outside of the integer ran...
Of course, for clades with a good fossil record determining whether early loss from fossils of decay-prone, phylogenetically informative characters has caused phylogenetic decay bias will be difficult because characters that are not preserved will not have been identified as being informative for ...