"The alternation of cold and mild phases during the Late Paleozoic Ice Age (LPIA; 372 – 254 million years ago) led to changes in the composition of animal life. We analyze how the diversity of lamp shells (brachiopods), snails (gastropods), and bivalves (clams, scallops, mussels, etc.) changes thro...
"Models for future environmental change all involve global warming, whether slow or fast. Predicting how plants and animals will respond to such warming can be aided by using ecogeographic biological ‘rules’, some long-established, that make predictions based on observations in nature, as well as p...
"The Late Triassic is enigmatic in terms of how terrestrial life evolved: it was the time when new groups arose, such as dinosaurs, lizards, crocodiles and mammals. Also, it witnessed a prolonged period of extinctions, distinguishing it from other great mass extinction events, while the gradual ris...
"Terrestrial insects are often remarkably well preserved in lacustrine Konservat Lagerstätten. However, the assumption that carcasses should sink fast through the water column seems contradictory as this scenario is unlikely due to excessive buoyancy and surface tension. The mechanisms that promote...
"Analyses of morphological disparity have been used to characterize and investigate the evolution of variation in the anatomy, function and ecology of organisms since the 1980s. While a diversity of methods have been employed, it is unclear whether they provide equivalent insights. Here, we review ...
"Reconstructing ecological niche evolution can provide insight into the biogeography and diversification of evolving lineages. However, comparative phylogenetic methods may infer the history of ecological niche evolution inaccurately because (a) species' niches are often poorly characterized; and (...
"Time calibrated trees are challenging to estimate for many extinct groups of species due to the incompleteness of the rock and fossil records. Additionally, the precise age of a sample is typically not known as it may have occurred at any time during the time interval spanned by the rock layer. Ba...
"The decline in species richness from the equator to the poles is referred to as the latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG). Higher equatorial diversity has been recognized for over 200 years, but the consistency of this pattern in deep time remains uncertain. Examination of spatial biodiversity patt...
"Clevosaurus (Late Triassic, Early Jurassic), a diapsid reptile belonging to the rhynchocephalians was used to study the dentary morphospace. Interestingly the morphospace differs from other rhynchocephalians. Finite element analysis indicates that the investigated species had bite forces and tooth...
"The San Diego Formation, Pico Formation, Careaga Sandstone, and Foxen Mudstone of southern California are thought to be late Pliocene to early Pleistocene; however, numerical ages have not been determined. Following assessment of diagenetic alteration via multiple methods including scanning electr...
