"Parasitism is one of the most common modes of life, and yet it is often disregarded or ignored in nature conservation. We are at the brink of the sixth mass extinction and in order to assess the extinction risk of both parasites and their hosts, we first need to fully understand the role and funct...
"The fossil record of parasites is limited thus far. A survey of the fossil record shows that some modes of preservation show a higher potential for the preservation of parasitic remains or parasite–host associations than generally recognized. A better understanding of the taphonomy of parasites is...
"Parasites are ubiquitous in modern ecosystems, occupy one of the most successful life modes, promote ecosystem stability, and, despite their typically diminutive size and lack of a mineralized skeleton, are commonly identified in the fossil record. Bivalve mollusks have occupied marine aquatic env...
"Fundamental ecological and evolutionary theories, such as community saturation and diversity-dependent diversification, assume that biotic competition restricts resource use, and thus limits realized niche breadth and geographic range size. This principle is called competitive exclusion. The corol...
"Insular woodiness (IW)—the evolutionary transition from herbaceousness towards woodiness on islands—is one of the most iconic features of island floras. Since pioneering work by Darwin and Wallace, five IW drivers have been proposed: (i) favourable aseasonal climate and (ii) lack of large native h...
"The cephalopod arm armature is certainly one of the most important morphological innovations responsible for the evolutionary success of the Cephalopoda. New palaeontological discoveries in the recent past afford to review and reassess origin and homology of suckers, sucker rings, hooks, and cirri...
"Extant marine arthropods are afflicted by a variety of parasitic diseases making it plausible that extinct trilobites also had a variety of parasites. Direct evidence in the form of preserved parasite body fossils is lacking to date, which is not surprising considering the poor preservation potent...
"Conodonts are some of the most important biostratigraphic index fossils in the Paleozoic and Triassic because of their rapid evolution and extensive distribution. Here we present a cladistic analysis of Early Triassic conodonts to reexamine the systematic classification and evolutionary relationsh...
"The Ordovician (∼487 to 443 Ma) ended with the formation of extensive Southern Hemisphere ice sheets, known as the Hirnantian glaciation, and the second largest mass extinction in Earth History. It was followed by the Silurian (∼443 to 419 Ma), one of the most climatically unstable periods of the ...
Colonial history and global economics distort our understanding of deep-time biodiversity - highlighting the effects of colonial history and socio-economic factors on sampling biases in the fossil record.
