"A key question about the end-Permian mass extinction (EPME) is why it has been so difficult to determine its impact on land plants: some analyses show a very clear loss of diversity and yet others show little change. Perhaps the key issue is the scale at which the diversity data are analysed. Here...
"The Middle Triassic Luoping Biota in south-west China represents the inception of modern marine ecosystems, with abundant and diverse arthropods, fishes and marine reptiles, indicating recovery from the Permian–Triassic mass extinction. Here we report a new specimen of the predatory marine reptile...
"The concept of evolvability—the capacity of a population to produce and maintain evolutionarily relevant variation—has become increasingly prominent in evolutionary biology. Paleontology has a long history of investigating questions of evolvability, but paleontological thinking has tended to negle...
"Human impacts reshape ecological communities through the extinction and introduction of species. The combined impact of these factors depends on whether non-native species fill the functional roles of extinct species, thus buffering the loss of functional diversity. This question has been difficul...
"Biodiversity today has the unusual property that 85% of plant and animal species live on land rather than in the sea, and half of these live in tropical rainforests. An explosive boost to terrestrial diversity occurred from c. 100–50 million years ago, the Late Cretaceous and early Palaeogene. Dur...
"Biodiversity today is uneven, with equally ancient sister groups containing few or many species. It has often been assumed that high biodiversity indicates fast evolution, and yet in a classic work in 1944 George Simpson suggested that fast evolution might generate instability and extinction, and ...
"Among life history traits, offspring size has one of the most direct impacts on fitness, influencing growth, recruitment and survival of the individual, therefore affecting population, and ultimately macroevolutionary outcomes. Despite its ecological and evolutionary importance, little is known ab...
"Species are distributed unevenly across the surface of Earth. More species are found in the warm tropics than in cool temperate regions. This pattern was first recognized over two centuries ago by Alexander von Humboldt, with his observation “The nearer we approach the tropics, the greater the inc...
"The role of time (i.e. taxa ages) in phylogeny has been a source of intense debate within palaeontology for decades and has not yet been resolved fully. The fossilised birth-death range process is a model that explicitly accounts for information about species through time. It presents a fresh oppo...
"The fossil record is the primary source of information on how biodiversity has varied in deep time, providing unique insight on the long-term dynamics of diversification and their drivers. However, interpretations of fossil record diversity patterns have been much debated, with a traditional focus...
