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The non-uniformity of fossil preservation
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Holland SM
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
2016[Jul]; 371
(1699
): ä PMID27325828
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The fossil record provides the primary source of data for calibrating the origin
of clades. Although minimum ages of clades are given by the oldest preserved
fossil, these underestimate the true age, which must be bracketed by
probabilistic methods based on multiple fossil occurrences. Although most of
these methods assume uniform preservation rates, this assumption is unsupported
over geological timescales. On geologically long timescales (more than 10 Myr),
the origin and cessation of sedimentary basins, and long-term variations in
tectonic subsidence, eustatic sea level and sedimentation rate control the
availability of depositional facies that preserve the environments in which
species lived. The loss of doomed sediments, those with a low probability of
preservation, imparts a secular trend to fossil preservation. As a result, the
fossil record is spatially and temporally non-uniform. Models of fossil
preservation should reflect this non-uniformity by using empirical estimates of
fossil preservation that are spatially and temporally partitioned, or by using
indirect proxies of fossil preservation. Geologically, realistic models of
preservation will provide substantially more reliable estimates of the
origination of clades.This article is part of the themed issue 'Dating species
divergences using rocks and clocks'.
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