"A major research question concerning global pelagic biodiversity remains unanswered: when did the apparent tropical biodiversity depression (i.e., bimodality of latitudinal diversity gradient ) begin? The bimodal LDG may be a consequence of recent ocean warming or of deep-time evolutionary speciat...
"Local and global environmental change is transforming ecological assemblages into new configurations, resulting in ecosystems with novel communities. Here we develop a robust methodology for the identification of novel communities, examine patterns in their natural chance of occurrence, and quanti...
"Poleward migration is a clear response of marine organisms to current global warming but the generality and geographical uniformity of this response are unclear. Marine fossils are expected to record the range shift responses of taxa and ecosystems to past climate change. However, unequal sampling...
"Fossil evidence for parasitic lineages are investigated including Acanthocephala, Annelida, Arthropoda, Nematoda, Nematomorpha, Pentastomida, Platyhelminthes. Despite the patchy fossil record of soft-bodied helminths, the group is more diverse than commonly assumed.Many forms have been around sinc...
"Direct observations of marine ecosystems are inherently limited in their temporal scope. Yet, ongoing global anthropogenic change urgently requires improved understanding of long-term baselines, greater insight into the relationship between climate and biodiversity, and knowledge of the evolutiona...
"The Late Devonian placoderm Titanichthys has tentatively been considered to have been a megaplanktivore... results from this study conform to the hypothesis that Titanichthys was a suspension feeder with jaws ill-suited for biting and crushing but well suited for gaping ram feeding."Large nektonic...
"Modern elasmobranchs have a long evolutionary history and an abundant fossil record that consists mainly of teeth. Many fossil taxa have living representatives. However, the representation of extant taxa in the fossil record is unknown. To begin to understand the geological history of extant elasm...
"We test for the presence of evolutionary stasis in a species of Late Cretaceous ammonoid cephalopod, Hoploscaphites nicolletii, from the North American Western Interior Seaway. ... Correlations between palaeoenvironmental conditions and morphological traits suggests ecophenotypic processes were at...
"Beta diversity, the compositional variation among communities, is often associated with environmental gradients. Other drivers of beta diversity include stochastic processes, priority effects, predation, or competitive exclusion. Temporal turnover may also explain differences in faunal composition...
"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...
