Paleobiology back issues from January 2005:
The importance of museum collections in paleobiology
Jan 01, 2005; ... For most people, the destruction of books has universally come to be thought of as a symbol of barbarity (e.g., Eco 1983). The burning of the library in Louvain, Belgium, by the German army in 1914 was, for example, seen around the world not only as an act of terror but also as an act against ...
Estimating paleodiversities: a test of the taxic and phylogenetic methods
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-The traditional "taxon counting" method of estimating ancient biodiversity is open to many criticisms, not least of which are the problem of inconsistency in the preservation of fossil organisms and the associated error on first and last appearance times of taxa. Construction of ...
Were there pack-hunting canids in the Tertiary, and how can we know?
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-Communal hunting allows some modern canids to catch large and powerful prey. As opposed to felids, for example, Recent canids have a limited ability to grapple and subdue prey by using their forelimbs. Instead, they engage in sustained pursuit predation and the success rate during this ...
Contrasting seasonal patterns of carbon gain in evergreen and deciduous trees of ancient polar forests
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-Polar deciduous forests were an important biome during much of the Mesozoic and Paleogene, occupying upwards of 40% of the total land surface. Little is known about their physiological ecology, however, because these types of forests do not exist for study today. Furthermore, the role ...
Faunal invasions as a source of morphological constraints and innovations? The diversification of the early Cardioceratidae (Ammonoidea; Middle Jurassic)
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-Multivariate analysis of shell characters and quantification of morphological diversity (morphospace occupation and disparity) are used here to investigate the modes of morphological diversification of ammonites. We define five events in early cardioceratid history that connect ...
Probable Proterozoic fungi
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-A large, morphologically heterogeneous population of acanthomorphic acritarchs from the early Neoproterozoic Wynniatt Formation, Victoria Island, northwestern Canada, is ascribed to two form-genera, Tappania and Germinosphaera, but just a single natural taxon, Tappania. Analysis of ...
Pulsed origination and extinction in the marine realm
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-The pattern of variation in taxonomic turnover on short timescales is expected to leave detectable signals even when taxonomic data are compiled at coarser timescales. Global, stage-level data on first and last appearances of marine animal genera are analyzed to determine whether it is ...
The morphological diversification of carnivores in North America
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-The evolutionary history of a clade has traditionally been studied through phylogenetics, and taxonomic diversity has been used as a crude proxy for morphological diversity. However, morphological diversification-beyond counting taxa-can provide a very different view of a clade's ...
Early Jurassic climate change and the radiation of organic-walled phytoplankton in the Tethys Ocean
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-During the Early Jurassic, cyst-forming dinoflagellates began a long-term radiation that would portend ecological importance of these taxa in the pelagic plankton community throughout the rest of the Mesozoic era. The factors that contributed to the evolutionary success of ...
Patterns of segregation and convergence in the evolution of fern and seed plant leaf morphologies
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-Global information on Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and extant non-angiosperm leaf morphologies has been gathered to investigate morphological diversity in leaves consistent with marginal growth and to identify likely departures from such development. Two patterns emerge from the principal ...
Arm regeneration in Mississippian crinoids: evidence of intense predation pressure in the Paleozoic?
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-Although direct predator-prey interactions are unobservable in the fossil record, predation has been used to explain many evolutionary trends. Evidence of predation supporting such hypotheses is often presented as isolated instances of preserved sublethal damage, and less commonly, as ...
Disparity, adaptation, exaptation, bookkeeping, and contingency at the genome level
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-The application of molecular genetics, in particular comparative genomics, to the field of evolutionary biology is paving the way to an enhanced "New Synthesis." Apart from their power to establish and refine phylogenies, understanding such genomic processes as the dynamics of change ...
PREFACE
Jan 01, 2005; ... Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) Steve Gould died in May, 2002. Since his death the world of paleobiology, indeed, the world of evolutionary biology in general, has just not been the same as it had been for the previous three and a half decades of his active professional life. Steve ...
The competitive Darwin
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-Although Darwin was not the first to conceive directional selection as a mechanism of phenotypic change, it is his ideas that were received, and that have shaped population biology to this day. A significant change in his theoretical orientation occurred in the mid-1850s. About then he ...
Whale barnacles: exaptational access to a forbidden paradise
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-Of all sessile filtrators, only some species of acorn barnacles managed to permanently settle on whales. Their key exaptation was probably a kind of biochemical cleaning process, which could be modified to penetrate into the host's dead cutis. Anchorage was further increased by coring ...
Wonderful strife: systematics, stem groups, and the phylogenetic signal of the Cambrian radiation
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-Gould's Wonderful Life (1989) was a landmark in the investigation of the Cambrian radiation. Gould argued that a number of experimental body plans ("problematica") had evolved only to become extinct, and that the Cambrian was a time of special fecundity in animal design. He focused ...
The neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography and Stephen Jay Gould
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-Neutral theory in ecology is based on the symmetry assumption that ecologically similar species in a community can be treated as demographically equivalent on a per capita basis-equivalent in birth and death rates, in rates of dispersal, and even in the probability of speciating ....
Heterochrony, disparity, and macroevolution
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-The concept of heterochrony has long had a central place in evolutionary theory. During their long history, heterochrony and several associated concepts such as paedomorphosis and neoteny have often been contentious and they continue to be criticized. Despite these criticisms, we ...
The evolution of complexity without natural selection, a possible large-scale trend of the fourth kind
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-A simple principle predicts a tendency, or vector, toward increasing organismal complexity in the history of life: As the parts of an organism accumulate variations in evolution, they should tend to become more different from each other. In other words, the variance among the parts, or ...
"Imperfections and oddities" in the origin of the nucleus
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-We outline a plausible evolutionary sequence that led from prokaryotes to the origin of the first nucleated cell. The nucleus is postulated to evolve after the archaebacterium and eubacterium merged to form the symbiotic ancestor of amitochondriate protists. Descendants of these ...
Tempo and mode of early animal evolution: inferences from rocks, Hox, and molecular clocks
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-One of the enduring puzzles to Stephen Jay Gould about life on Earth was the cause or causes of the fantastic diversity of animals that exploded in the fossil record starting around 530 Ma-the Cambrian explosion. In this contribution, we first review recent phylogenetic and molecular ...
Key innovations, convergence, and success: macroevolutionary lessons from plant phylogeny
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-Improvements in our understanding of green plant phylogeny are casting new light on the connection between character evolution and diversification. The repeated discovery of paraphyly has helped disentangle what once appeared to be phylogenetically coincident character changes, but ...
Stephen Jay Gould on species selection: 30 years of insight
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-Stephen Jay Gould made impressive contributions to macroevolutionary theory; one of the topics in this area that particularly interested him was how to define and recognize species selection. Here we explore how and why Gould's ideas on concepts related to species selection evolved ...
The dynamics of evolutionary stasis
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-The fossil record displays remarkable stasis in many species over long time periods, yet studies of extant populations often reveal rapid phenotypic evolution and genetic differentiation among populations. Recent advances in our understanding of the fossil record and in population ...
Mass turnover and heterochrony events in response to physical change
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-The thoughts and writings of Stephen Jay Gould have had an enormous impact on the shaping of macroevolutionary theory. The notion of punctuated equilibria (Eldredge and Gould 1972) remained prominent throughout his work. It also unleashed a storm of debate in paleontology and ...
Mass extinctions and macroevolution
Jan 01, 2005; ... Abstract.-Mass extinctions are important to macroevolution not only because they involve a sharp increase in extinction intensity over "background" levels, but also because they bring a change in extinction selectivity, and these quantitative and qualitative shifts set the stage for evolutionary ...