Roger Close

Jan 23, 2025 | cell.com | Bouwe R. Reijenga |Roger Close

Keywords speciation extinction macroevolution sampling bias fossil record Phanerozoic age-rate scaling Results and discussion The presence of age-rate scaling (ARS) is a long-studied phenomenon in paleobiology,5,6 and it bears close resemblance to the problem of “spurious” self-correlation when a ratio is plotted against its denominator across ecology, evolution, geology, and statistics.7,8,9,10,11 For instance, when an evolutionary rate such as the number of extinctions per million years...

Jan 20, 2025 | biorxiv.org | Roger Close |Roger Benson |Wolfgang Kiessling |Erin E. Saupe

AbstractReefs are important hotspots of marine biodiversity today, and acted as cradles of diversification in the geological past. However, we know little about how the diversity of reef-supporting regions varied through deep time, and how this differed from other regions. We quantified regional diversity patterns in reef-supporting and non-reef-supporting regions in the fossil record of Phanerozoic marine invertebrates.

Oct 10, 2024 | onlinelibrary.wiley.com | Menna E. Jones |Roger Close

The incompleteness of the fossil record means that it cannot be read literally. Because of this, a substantial body of research has addressed the impacts of sampling and preservational biases on our understanding of biodiversity change across time and space (e.g. Raup 1972; Koch 1978; Alroy et al. 2001; Smith 2001; Crampton et al. 2003; Jablonski et al. 2003; Smith & McGowan 2007; McGowan & Smith 2008; Close et al. 2020; Benson et al. 2021; Antell et al. 2024).

Sep 19, 2024 | biorxiv.org | Roger Close |Bouwe Rutger Reijenga

AbstractMass extinctions are rare but catastrophic events that profoundly disrupt biodiversity.

Sep 13, 2024 | biorxiv.org | Bouwe Rutger Reijenga |Roger Close

AbstractNegative scaling relationships between both speciation and extinction rates on the one hand, and the age or duration of organismal groups on the other, are pervasive and recovered in both molecular phylogenetic and fossil time series. The consistency between molecular and fossil data hints at a universal cause, and potentially to incongruence between micro- and macroevolution.