"The Cambrian saw a dramatic increase in metazoan diversity and abundance. Between-assemblage diversity (beta diversity) soared in the first three Cambrian stages, suggesting a rapid increase in the geodisparity of marine animals during the Cambrian radiation. However, it remains unclear how these ...
"Mammals, birds, and squamates (lizards, snakes, and relatives) are key living vertebrates, and thus understanding their evolution underpins important questions in biodiversity science. Whereas the origins of mammals and birds are relatively well understood, the roots of squamates have been obscure...
"Conservation paleobiology has coalesced over the last two decades since its formal coining, united by the goal of applying geohistorical records to inform the conservation, management, and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Yet, the field is still attempting to form an identity di...
"Highlights:
The rapid accumulation of information from diverse sources – such as cheap sequencing and growing community databases, together with improvements in computational speed – has fueled a growth in increasingly complex models in many fields, including macroevolutionary biology.
Des...
"The fascination with ancient flora and fauna is a centuries-old phenomenon and is one of the main drivers of fossil crimes. Fossils have been sought by the rich and famous since the advent of colonialism, propelling development in the field of palaeontology but also in how fossils make their way t...
"Placoderms are an extinct group of early jawed vertebrates that play a key role in understanding the evolution of the gnathostome body plan, including the origin of novelties such as jaws, teeth, and pelvic fins. As placoderms have a poorly ossified axial skeleton, preservation of the mainly carti...
Winter is coming and our new workshops – BITE and IRAL – have held their first meetings. In the kick-offs, held online, the first cornerstones were set and more precise timetables were created. After an intensive exchange among the members, we are now moving into the active phase in ...
"Ecosystem services such as food provisioning, climate regulation, nutrient cycling, or recreation in open landscapes underpin human wellbeing. They are highly dependent on land use, land cover and utilization pattern as well as environmental factors like climate, topography and soil. In consequenc...
"Geoparks in China have been a great success story, with 284 national geoparks and 41 of them accorded UNESCO international status, the highest number for any country in the world. We track the progress of one of the geoparks, Luoping Biota National Geopark in Yunnan Province, from initial plans af...
Congratulations to Nussaibah from the DDCP Speaker Series workshop. Her article on colonialism and today's biodiversity was recently published in Nature ecology & evolution.
"The effects of the redistribution of flora and fauna by European empires are still visible in global biodiversity tod...
