"The classical taxonomy of fossil invertebrates is based on subjective judgments of morphology, which can cause confusion, because there are no codified standards for the classification of genera. Here, we explore the validity of the genus taxonomy of 75 species and morphospecies of the Follicucull...
"During the GOBE biodiversity increased remarkedly. Origination and extinction appears similar across diverse groups and geographical areas. This study focuses on hard substrate taxa and results indicate that there was a common cause of Ordovician diversification dynamics"The Great Ordovician Biodi...
"Trilobites offer insight into the growth and development of fossil ecdysozoans. Elrathia kingii (Meek) is used to estimate growth rates and describe shape change over the ontogeny. The rate of cephalic shape change in E. kingii decreased at the transition from meraspis to holaspis, while the pygid...
"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...
