According to when they attained high diversity, major taxa of marine animals have been clustered into three groups, the Cambrian, Paleozoic, and Modern Faunas. Because the Cambrian Fauna was a relatively minor component of the total fauna after mid-Ordovician time, the Phanerozoic history of marine animal diversity is largely a matter of the fates of the Paleozoic and Modern Faunas. The fact that most late Cenozoic genera belong to taxa that have been radiating for tens of millions of years indicates that the post-Paleozoic increase in diversity indicated by fossil data is real, rather than an artifact of improvement of the fossil record toward the present.

Assuming that ecological crowding produced the so-called Paleozoic plateau for family diversity, various workers have used the logistic equation of ecology to model marine animal diversification as damped exponential increase. Several lines of evidence indicate that this procedure is inappropriate. A plot of the diversity of marine animal genera through time provides better resolution than the plot for families and has a more jagged appearance. Generic diversity generally increased rapidly during the Paleozoic, except when set back by pulses of mass extinction. In fact, an analysis of the history of the Paleozoic Fauna during the Paleozoic Era reveals no general correlation between rate of increase for this fauna and total marine animal diversity. Furthermore, realistically scaled logistic simulations do not mimic the empirical pattern. In addition, it is difficult to imagine how some fixed limit for diversity could have persisted throughout the Paleozoic Era, when the ecological structure of the marine ecosystem was constantly changing. More fundamentally, the basic idea that competition can set a limit for marine animal diversity is incompatible with basic tenets of marine ecology: predation, disturbance, and vagaries of recruitment determine local population sizes for most marine species. Sparseness of predators probably played a larger role than weak competition in elevating rates of diversification during the initial (Ordovician) radiation of marine animals and during recoveries from mass extinctions. A plot of diversification against total diversity for these intervals yields a band of points above the one representing background intervals, and yet this band also displays no significant trend (if the two earliest intervals of the initial Ordovician are excluded as times of exceptional evolutionary innovation). Thus, a distinctive structure characterized the marine ecosystem during intervals of evolutionary radiation—one in which rates of diversification were exceptionally high and yet increases in diversity did not depress rates of diversification.

Particular marine taxa exhibit background rates of origination and extinction that rank similarly when compared with those of other taxa. Rates are correlated in this way because certain heritable traits influence probability of speciation and probability of extinction in similar ways. Background rates of origination and extinction were depressed during the late Paleozoic ice age for all major marine invertebrate taxa, but remained correlated. Also, taxa with relatively high background rates of extinction experienced exceptionally heavy losses during biotic crises because background rates of extinction were intensified in a multiplicative manner; decimation of a large group of taxa of this kind in the two Permian mass extinctions established their collective identity as the Paleozoic Fauna.

Characteristic rates of origination and extinction for major taxa persisted from Paleozoic into post-Paleozoic time. Because of the causal linkage between rates of origination and extinction, pulses of extinction tended to drag down overall rates of origination as well as overall rates of extinction by preferentially eliminating higher taxa having relatively high background rates of extinction. This extinction/origination ratchet depressed turnover rates for the residual Paleozoic Fauna during the Mesozoic Era. A decline of this fauna's extinction rate to approximately that of the Modern Fauna accounts for the nearly equal fractional losses experienced by the two faunas in the terminal Cretaceous mass extinction.

Viewed arithmetically, the fossil record indicates slow diversification for the Modern Fauna during Paleozoic time, followed by much more rapid expansion during Mesozoic and Cenozoic time. When viewed more appropriately as depicting geometric—or exponential—increase, however, the empirical pattern exhibits no fundamental secular change: the background rate of increase for the Modern Fauna—the fauna that dominated post-Paleozoic marine diversity—simply persisted, reflecting the intrinsic origination and extinction rates of constituent taxa. Persistence of this overall background rate supports other evidence that the empirical record of diversification for marine animal life since Paleozoic time represents actual exponential increase. This enduring rate makes it unnecessary to invoke environmental change to explain the post-Paleozoic increase of marine diversity.

Because of the resilience of intrinsic rates, an empirically based simulation that entails intervals of exponential increase for the Paleozoic and Modern Faunas, punctuated by mass extinctions, yields a pattern that is remarkably similar to the empirical pattern. It follows that marine animal genera and species will continue to diversify exponentially long into the future, barring disruption of the marine ecosystem by human-induced or natural environmental changes.

Digitate shell morphologies have evolved repeatedly in planktonic foraminifera throughout the Cretaceous and Cenozoic. Digitate species are usually rare in fossil and modern assemblages but show increased abundance and diversity at times during the Cretaceous and middle Eocene. In this paper we discuss the morphology and stratigraphic distribution of digitate planktonic foraminifera and establish the isotopic depth ecology of fossil ones to draw parallels with modern counterparts. δ18O and δ13C values of six extinct and two modern digitate species, from six time slices (Cenomanian, Turonian, Eocene, Miocene, Pleistocene and Holocene) have similar isotopic depth ecologies, consistently registering the most negative δ13C and usually the most positive δ18O compared to coexisting species. These results indicate a similar deep, subthermocline (é150 m) habitat, characterized by lower temperatures, reduced oxygen, and enrichment of dissolved inorganic carbon. This is consistent with water-column plankton studies that provide insight into the depth preferences of the three modern digitate species; in over 70% of observations digitates occurred in nets below 150 m, and down to 2000 m. The correlation between digitate species and subsurface habitats across multiple epochs suggests that elongated chambers were advantageous for survival in a deep mesopelagic habitat, where food is usually scarce. Increased abundance and diversity of digitates in association with some early and mid-Cretaceous oceanic anoxic events, in middle Eocene regions of coastal and equatorial upwelling, and occasionally in some modern upwelling regions, suggests an additional link with episodes of enhanced ocean productivity associated with expansion of the oxygen minimum zone (OMZ). We suggest that the primary function of digitate chambers was as a feeding specialization that increased effective shell size and food gathering efficiency, for survival in a usually food-poor environment, close to the OMZ. Episodes of increased digitate abundance and diversity indicate expansion of the deep-water ecologic opportunity under conditions that were unfavorable to other planktonic species. Our results provide evidence of iterative evolution reflecting common functional constraints on planktonic foraminifera shell morphology within similar subsurface habitats. They also highlight the potential of digitate species to act as indicators of deep watermasses, especially where there was expansion of the OMZ.

Unfossiliferous marine sedimentary rocks of Phanerozoic age are known to all field-oriented paleontologists. These troublesome units are often encountered in the field, perhaps cursed roundly for a moment or two, and usually shrugged off in pursuit of the next fossiliferous interval. Paleontologists tend not to discuss barren units, and they rarely publish on the absence of a fauna from what appears to be unaltered marine rock. But aren't barren marine sediments revealing something important about their paleoenvironment and possibly about the paleoenvironments of conformably adjacent fossil-bearing units? Shouldn't paleontologists be just as interested in knowing the locations and ages of unfossiliferous sediments as they are fossiliferous strata?

The richness (number of species) and evenness (uniformity of species abundances) of death assemblages can differ from corresponding living communities due to processes such as between-habitat transport, environmental condensation, and differential taphonomic destruction. Analysis of 132 single-census live-dead comparisons of benthic molluscs from a variety of soft-bottom marine settings indicates that on average evenness does not differ greatly between live and dead assemblages, regardless of the particular depositional setting or grain size of associated sediment. However, individual death assemblages can deviate quite substantially from their corresponding living assemblages, especially if processed using a fine mesh. In addition, death assemblages collected using sieves with 2 mm mesh or coarser showed consistently and significantly greater evenness than corresponding living assemblages. These results are encouraging for broad-scale assessments of evenness in the fossil record based on the comparison of average values (rather than for individual assemblages) and where trends in evenness are the aim of the study.

Our live-dead comparisons of richness sample-size corrected by rarefaction revealed that death assemblages were on average ~1.45 times richer than the corresponding living assemblages regardless of rarefied size. In 63.6% of death assemblages both dead richness and dead evenness were greater than live, suggesting sufficient time-averaging to catch significant random or directional changes in the living community and/or introduction of individuals from outside the sampled habitat. In 12.9% of collections both dead richness and dead evenness were less than live, suggesting either rapid loss of dead shells so that dead diversity is depressed below the local living community or selective loss of taphonomically vulnerable taxa. In 18.2% of data sets dead richness was elevated but dead evenness was depressed relative to live: these are interpreted to reflect the addition of low-evenness allochthonous material. The remaining 4.5% of data sets had elevated dead evenness but depressed dead richness, suggesting that live and dead in this case may not be closely related.

In seven available time series, temporal volatility in living communities over 6–24 months was considerable but could not account for observed (mostly higher) evenness values in corresponding death assemblages, whose evenness and composition were quite stable in the few examined studies. A densely sampled spatial transect shows that changes in living-assemblage evenness along an environmental gradient were preserved in the corresponding death assemblages, although dead evenness at any location on the gradient was substantially higher than living evenness.

The 2.0–1.8-billion-year-old Stirling Range Formation in southwestern Australia preserves the deposits of a siliciclastic shoreline formed under the influence of storms, longshore currents, and tidal currents. Sandstones contain a megascopic fossil biota represented by discoidal fossils similar to the Ediacaran Aspidella Billings, 1872, as well as ridge pairs preserved in positive hyporelief on the soles of channel-fill sandstones bounded by mud drapes. The ridges run parallel or nearly parallel for most of their length, meeting in a closed loop at one end and opening with a slight divergence at the opposite end. The ridges are interpreted as casts of sediment-laden mucus strings formed by the movement of multicellular or syncytial organisms along a muddy surface. The taxa Myxomitodes stirlingensis n. igen., n. isp., are introduced for these traces. The Stirling biota was roughly coeval with other presumed multicellular eukaryotes appearing after a long period of profound environmental changes involving a rise in ambient oxygen levels, similar to that which preceded the Cambrian explosion. The failure of multicellular life to diversify during most of the Proterozoic may be due to environmental constraints related to the comparatively low level of oxidation of the world oceans.

By digitally imaging colonies with more than a hundred cells, the distributions of cell size and shape are determined for four examples of 2-Ga microfossils: bacillus-shaped Eosynechococcus moorei and three dyads or diplococci (Sphaerophycus parvum and two forms of Eoentophysalis belcherensis). By assuming that each colony obeys steady-state growth, the measured distributions can be inverted to infer the time evolution of the individual cell shape. The time evolution can also be predicted analytically from rate-based models of cell growth, permitting the data to distinguish among different postulates for the physical principles governing growth. The cell cycles are found to be best described by the exponential growth of cell volume, although linear volume growth is not ruled out. However, the measured dyad cycles are inconsistent with several growth models based on surface area or the behavior of the septum at the division plane. Where they have been measured, modern bacilli obey exponential growth whereas eukaryotics obey linear growth, which implies that these 2-Ga microfossils are likely prokaryotic.

The late Neogene was a time of major environmental change in Tropical America. Global cooling and associated oceanographic reorganization and the onset and intensification of glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere during the past ten million years coincided with the uplift of the Central American isthmus and resulting changes in regional oceanographic conditions. Previous analyses of patterns of taxonomic turnover and the shifting abundances of major ecological guilds indicated that the regional shallow-water marine biota responded to these environmental changes through extinction and via a restructuring of local benthic food webs, but it is not clear whether this ecological response had an effect on the diversity of molluscan assemblages in the region. Changes in regional and local diversity are often used as proxies for similar ecological response to environmental change in large-scale paleontological studies, but a clear relationship between diversity and ecological function has rarely been demonstrated in marine systems dominated by mollusks. To explore this relationship, we have compiled a data set of the stratigraphic and environmental distribution of genera of mollusks in large new collections of fossil specimens from the late Neogene and Recent of the southwestern Caribbean. Analysis of a selection of ecological diversity measures indicates that within shelf depths, assemblages from deeper water (51–200 m) were more diverse than shallow-water (<50 m) assemblages in the Pliocene. Lower diversity for shallow-water assemblages is caused by increased dominance of a few superabundant taxa in each assemblage. This implies that studies of diversity of shelf benthos need to control for relatively fine scaled environmental conditions if they are to avoid interpreting artifacts of uneven sampling as true change of diversity. For shallow-water assemblages only, there was significant increase in local and regional diversity of bivalve assemblages after the late Pliocene. No parallel increase in gastropods could be detected, but this likely is because sample size was inadequate for documenting the diversity of gastropod assemblages following a steep post-Pliocene decline of average gastropod abundance. Both the increasing bivalve diversity and the decrease in average abundance of gastropod taxa correspond to an interval of increasing carbonate deposition and reef building in the region, and are likely a result of increased fine-scale habitat heterogeneity controlled by the local distribution of carbonate buildups. Each of these results demonstrates that documenting the ecological response of tropical marine ecosystems to regional environmental change requires a large volume of fine-scaled samples with detailed paleoenvironmental control. Such data sets are rarely available from the fossil record.

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database are used to analyze the waxing and waning of genera over time. Irrespective of whether we tabulate species richness, frequency of occurrence, geographic range, or other measures, the average rise and fall of genera is remarkably symmetrical. Genera tend already to be in a state of decline when they become extinct. Genera that last appear in the major mass extinction stages, however, are more frequently truncated while they are holding steady or even increasing. This need not imply that mass extinctions are qualitatively different from other events; it is consistent with the expected effects of simply increasing the magnitude of extinction. For reasons that are not completely clear, post-Paleozoic genera show less of a rise and fall on average and tend to be less symmetrical than do Paleozoic genera.

The history of life is punctuated by a number of major transitions in hierarchy, defined here as the degree of nestedness of lower-level individuals within higher-level ones: the combination of single-celled prokaryotic cells to form the first eukaryotic cell, the aggregation of single eukaryotic cells to form complex multicellular organisms, and finally, the association of multicellular organisms to form complex colonial individuals. These transitions together constitute one of the most salient and certain trends in the history of life, in particular, a trend in maximum hierarchical structure, which can be understood as a trend in complexity. This trend could be produced by a biased mechanism, in which increases in hierarchy are more likely than decreases, or by an unbiased one, in which increases and decreases are about equally likely. At stake is whether or not natural selection or some other force acts powerfully over the history of life to drive complexity upward.

Too few major transitions are known to permit rigorous statistical discrimination of trend mechanisms based on these transitions alone. However, the mechanism can be investigated by using “minor transitions” in hierarchy, or, in other words, changes in the degree of individuation of the upper level. This study tests the null hypothesis that the probability (or rate) of increase and decrease in individuation are equal in a phylogenetic context. We found published phylogenetic trees for clades spanning minor transitions across the tree of life and identified changes in character states associated with those minor transitions. We then used both parsimony- and maximum-likelihood-based methods to test for asymmetrical rates of character evolution. Most analyses failed to reject equal rates of hierarchical increase and decrease. In fact, a bias toward decreasing complexity was observed for several clades. These results suggest that no strong tendency exists for hierarchical complexity to increase.

Cheek teeth of some mammalian herbivores exhibit pronounced changes in occlusal size and shape through wear, purportedly caused by strong curvature. Such changes are extreme in the upper cheek teeth of extinct, dentally archaic lagomorphs. Morphologic and taxonomic turnover in lagomorphs suggests that these dentally archaic forms may have been unable to develop hypselodont (ever-growing) cheek teeth. This study investigates how the interaction of tooth shape and wear can cause occlusal size and shape changes, and potentially impose structural constraints on crown height. These constraints may help explain extinction of mammals with teeth like archaic lagomorphs, evolution and diversification of other mammalian herbivores during the late Miocene, and the relative paucity of hypsodont cheek tooth shapes in extant mammals.

I first quantify two-dimensional curvature accounting for shape differences observed in hypsodont teeth, P4s of the archaic lagomorphs Russellagus and Hesperolagomys, which exhibit pronounced change with wear, and Ondatra lower incisors, which show minimal change with wear. Using this quantification, I generate theoretical curvature morphologies and describe a geometric model of tooth wear that generates values for qualitative and quantitative aspects of the occlusal surface at different wear stages. Modeled results of wear surface topography and dimensions closely correspond to observed patterns in Russellagus, Hesperolagomys, and Ondatra. Model results on wear in theoretical tooth morphologies identify two major shape factors influencing wear: orientation of the wear surface (incisor-like or cheek-tooth-like), and tooth curvature (“concentric” or “nonconcentric”). Modeled wear also suggests two geometric constraints on crown height. Teeth with nonconcentric curvatures can have crown height limited by potential tooth area. “Incomplete wear” in any tooth can present severe constraints on increasing crown height, causing structurally untenable morphologies in very tall-crowned to hypselodont teeth.

The end-Permian mass extinction is commonly portrayed not only as a massive biodiversity crisis but also as the time when marine benthic faunas changed from the Paleozoic Fauna, dominated by rhynchonelliform brachiopod taxa, to the Modern Fauna, dominated by gastropod and bivalve taxa. After the end-Permian mass extinction, scenarios involving the Mesozoic Marine Revolution portray a steady increase in numerical dominance by these benthic molluscs as largely due to the evolutionary effects of an “arms race.” We report here a new global paleoecological database from study of shell beds that shows a dramatic geologically sudden earliest Triassic takeover by bivalves as numerical dominants in level-bottom benthic marine communities, which continued through the Early Triassic. Three bivalve genera were responsible for this switch, none of which has any particular morphological features to distinguish it from many typical Paleozoic bivalve genera. The numerical success of these Early Triassic bivalves cannot be attributed to any of the well-known morphological evolutionary innovations of post-Paleozoic bivalves that characterize the Mesozoic Marine Revolution. Rather, their ability to mount this takeover most likely was due to the large extinction of rhynchonelliform brachiopods during the end-Permian mass extinction and aided by their environmental distribution and physiological characteristics that enabled them to thrive during periods of oceanic and atmospheric stress during the Permian/Triassic transition.

Geographic range size is one of the few traits that promoted survivorship during both mass and background extinctions, but the exact reason (or reasons) why a large geographic range confers extinction resistance remains unclear. Proposed explanations have focused on the roles of dispersal ability, climate tolerance, global abundance, and widespread ranges in predicting taxon longevities. This study uses biogeographic data for late Paleozoic brachiopod genera to test the relative contribution of these traits to genus longevities, using simple but accurate proxy measurements. The results demonstrate a strong positive relationship between genus longevity and geographic range size, which is robust to several potential errors. Further, latitudinal range, which predominantly reflects climate tolerance, was no more important than longitudinal range, which predominantly reflects dispersal ability, in predicting genus longevities. Rather, longevities were an outcome of the total number of occurrences, which estimates global abundance, and the advantages of widespread distribution, regardless of which particular traits were responsible for generating the total geographic range. The advantages of a large geographic range were apparent during both background and mass extinctions of late Paleozoic time. Although not statistically significant, there was a tendency for the greatest selectivity to occur in intervals with the lowest extinction rates. The correlation of genus longevity and geographic range size had a profound consequence for the secular pattern of global brachiopod diversity: because the diversity of genera with small geographic ranges was more volatile owing to their correspondingly shorter longevities, global diversity and mean geographic range size paralleled each other almost exactly. Given that the correlation between taxon longevity and geographic range size has also been demonstrated for other taxonomic groups and at other time intervals, these results suggest that global diversity curves compiled from taxonomic databases dominantly reflect changes in the diversity of genera with small geographic ranges.

An extreme, dorsally hyperextended posture of the spine (opisthotonus), characterized by the skull and neck recurved over the back, and with strong extension of the tail, is observed in many well-preserved, articulated amniote skeletons (birds and other dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and at least placental mammals). Postmortem water transport may explain some cases of spinal curvature in fossil tetrapods, but we show how these can be distinguished from causes of the opisthotonic posture, which is a biotic syndrome. Traditional biotic explanations nearly all involve postmortem causes, and have included rigor mortis, desiccation, and contraction of tendons and ligaments. However, examination of the process of rigor mortis and experimental observations of drying and salinity in carcasses of extant animals show that these explanations of the “dead bird” (opisthotonic) posture account for few or no cases. Differential contraction of cervical ligaments after death also does not produce the opisthotonic posture. It is not postmortem contraction but perimortem muscle spasms resulting from various afflictions of the central nervous system that cause these extreme postures. That is, the opisthotonic posture is the result of “death throes,” not postmortem processes, and individuals so afflicted assumed the posture before death, not afterward. The clinical literature has long recognized that such afflicted individuals perish from asphyxiation, lack of nourishment or essential nutrients, environmental toxins, or viral infections, among other causes. Accepting the actual causes of the opisthotonic posture as perimortem and not postmortem provides insights into the causes of death of fossilized specimens, and also revises interpretations of paleoenvironmental conditions of many fossil deposits. The opisthotonic posture tells us more about the circumstances surrounding death than about what happened after death. Finally, the opisthotonic posture appears to have a phylogenetic signal: it is so far reported entirely in ornithodiran archosaurs (dinosaurs and pterosaurs) and in crown-group placentals, though the distribution in mammals may expand with further study. It seems important that the opisthotonic posture has been observed extensively only in clades of animals that are known or thought to have high basal metabolic rates: hypoxia and related diseases would be most likely to affect animals with high oxygen use rates.

Ecology is thought to be of crucial importance in determining taxonomic turnover at geological time scales, yet general links between ecology and biodiversity dynamics are still poorly explored in deep time. Here we analyze the relationships between the environmental affinities of Triassic–Jurassic marine benthic genera and their biodiversity dynamics, using a large, taxonomically vetted data set of Triassic–Jurassic taxonomic occurrences.

On the basis of binomial probabilities of proportional occurrence counts, we identify environmental affinities of genera for (1) carbonate versus siliciclastic substrates, (2) onshore versus offshore depositional environments, (3) reefs versus level-bottom communities, and (4) tropical versus non-tropical latitudinal zones. Genera with affinities for carbonates, onshore environments, and reefs have higher turnover rates than genera with affinities for siliciclastic, offshore, and level-bottom settings. Differences in faunal turnover are largely due to differences in origination rates. Whereas previous studies have highlighted the direct influence of physical and biological factors in exploring environmental controls on evolutionary rates, our analyses show that the patterns can largely be explained by the partitioning of higher taxa with different evolutionary tempos among environments. The relatively slowly evolving bivalves are concentrated in siliciclastic rocks and in level-bottom communities. Furthermore, separate analyses on bivalves did not produce significant differences in turnover rates between environmental settings. The relationship between biodiversity dynamics and environments in our data set is thus governed by the partitioning of higher taxa within environmental categories and not directly due to greater chances of origination in particular settings. As this partitioning probably has ecological reasons rather than being a simple sampling artifact, we propose an indirect environmental control on evolutionary rates.

Affinities for latitudinal zones are not linked to systematically different turnover rates, possibly because of paleoclimatic fluctuations and latitudinal migrations of taxa. However, the strong extinction spike of tropical genera in the Rhaetian calls for an important paleoclimatic component in the end-Triassic mass extinction.

The magnitude and pace of terrestrial plant extinction and macroecological change associated with the Triassic/Jurassic (Tr/J) mass extinction boundary have not been quantified using paleoecological data. However, tracking the diversity and ecology of primary producers provides an ideal surrogate with which to explore patterns of ecosystem stability, collapse, and recovery and to explicitly test for gradual versus catastrophic causal mechanisms of extinction.

We present an analysis of the vegetation dynamics in the Jameson Land Basin, East Greenland, spanning the Tr/J extinction event, from a census collected paleoecological data set of 4303 fossil leaf specimens, in an attempt to better constrain our understanding of the causes and consequences of the fourth greatest extinction event in earth history. Our analyses reveal (1) regional turnover of ecological dominants between Triassic and Jurassic plant communities, (2) marked structural changes in the vegetation as reflected by potential loss of a mid-canopy habit, and (3) decline in generic-level richness and evenness and change in ecological composition prior to the Tr/J boundary; all of these findings argue against a single catastrophic causal mechanism, such as a meteorite impact for Tr/J extinctions. We identify various key ecological and biological traits that increased extinction risk at the Tr/J boundary and corroborate predictions of meta-population theory or plant ecophysiological models. These include ecological rarity, complex reproductive biology, and large leaf size.

Recovery in terms of generic-level richness was quite rapid following Tr/J extinctions; however, species-level turnover in earliest Jurassic plant communities remained an order of magnitude higher than observed for the Triassic. We hypothesize, on the basis of evidence for geographically extensive macrofossil and palynological turnover across the entire Jameson Land Basin, that the nature and magnitude of paleoecological changes recorded in this study reflect wider vegetation change across the whole region. How exactly these changes in dominance patterns of plant primary production affected the entire ecosystem remains an important avenue of future research.

We present a new three-dimensional theoretical ecospace for the ecological classification of marine animals based on vertical tiering, motility level, and feeding mechanism. In this context, analyses of a database of level-bottom fossil assemblages with abundance counts demonstrate fundamental changes in marine animal ecosystems between the mid-Paleozoic (461–359 Ma) and late Cenozoic (23–0.01 Ma). The average local relative abundance of infaunal burrowers, facultatively motile animals, and predators increased, whereas surface dwellers and completely non-motile animals decreased in abundance. Considering tiering, motility, and feeding together, more modes of life had high to moderate average relative abundance in the Cenozoic than in the Paleozoic. These results are robust to the biasing effects of aragonite dissolution in Paleozoic sediments and to heterogeneities in the latitudinal and environmental distributions of collections. Theoretical ecospace provides a unified system for future analyses of the utilization of ecologic opportunities by marine metazoa.

We use two approaches to test hypotheses regarding function in a group of extinct mammals (Family Mesotheriidae, Order Notoungulata) that lack any close extant relatives: a principle-derived paradigm method and empirically derived analog method. Metric and discrete morphological traits of mesotheriid postcranial elements are found to be consistent with the morphology predicted by a modified version of Hildebrand's paradigm for scratch diggers. Ratios of in-force to out-force lever arms based on skeletal elements indicate that the mesotheriids examined had limbs modified for high out-forces (i.e., they were “low geared”), consistent with the digging hypothesis. Other mesotheriid characters, such as cleft ungual phalanges, a curved olecranon, and a highly modified pelvis (with extra vertebrae incorporated into the sacrum and fusion between the ischium and the axial skeleton) are regarded as being functionally significant for digging and also occur in a variety of extant diggers. Analog methods indicate that mesotheriids share numerous traits common to a variety of extant diggers. Principal component analyses of postcranial elements indicate that mesotheriids consistently share morphometric space with larger extant fossorial mammals: aardvark, anteaters, wombats, and badger. Likewise, discriminant function analyses categorized mesotheriids as fossorial, though imperfectly analogous to the extant diggers analyzed. Thus, both theory-driven and empirically derived methods of estimating function in these extinct taxa support a digging hypothesis for the mesotheriids examined. Adaptations for digging in both the forelimb and sacropelvic functional complexes of mesotheriids provide independent support for the fossorial hypothesis.

This paper takes an alternative approach to the problem of inferring patterns of phenotypic evolution in the fossil record. Reconstructing temporal biological signal from noisy stratophenetic data is an inverse problem analogous to subsurface reconstructions in geophysics, and similar methods apply. To increase the information content of stratophenetic series, available geological data on sample ages and environments are included as prior knowledge, and all inferences are conditioned on the uncertainty in these geological variables. This uncertainty, as well as data error and the stochasticity of fossil preservation and evolution, prevents any unique solution to the stratophenetic inverse problem. Instead, the solution is defined as a distribution of model parameter values that explain the data to varying degrees. This distribution is obtained by direct Monte Carlo sampling of the parameter space, and evaluated with Bayesian integrals. The Bayesian inversion is illustrated with Miocene stratigraphic data from the ODP Leg 174AX Bethany Beach borehole. A sample of the benthic foraminifer Pseudononion pizarrensis is used to obtain a phenotypic covariance matrix for outline shape, which constrains a model of multivariate shape evolution. The forward model combines this evolutionary model and stochastic models of fossil occurrence with the empirical sedimentary record to generate predicted stratophenetic series. A synthetic data set is inverted, using the Neighbourhood Algorithm to sample the parameter space and characterize the posterior probability distribution. Despite small sample sizes and noisy shape data, most of the generating parameter values are well resolved, and the underlying pattern of phenotypic evolution can be reconstructed, with quantitative measures of uncertainty. Inversion of a stratigraphic series into a time series can significantly improve our perception and interpretation of an evolutionary pattern.