ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2009
Two-phase increase in the maximum size of life over 3.5 billion years reflects biological innovation and environmental opportunity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 60 papers.
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Who cites it
60 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Diverging selection on body size in specialist terrestrial mammals.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Mapping life's disparity and evolutionary constraints in a geometric complexity space.Science advances · 2026Article
- Evolution and Observable Properties of Rocky Planet Atmospheres.Space science reviews · 2026Review
- Mid-Devonian ocean oxygenation enabled the expansion of animals into deeper-water habitats.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Episodic body size variations of early Paleozoic trilobites associated with marine redox changes.Science advances · 2025Article
- Low oxygen but dynamic marine redox conditions permitted the Cambrian Radiation.Science advances · 2025Article
- Nrf1 acts as a highly-conserved determinon for maintaining robust redox homeostasis in the eco-evo-devo process of life histories.Cell stress · 2025Review
- Oxygen-binding proteins aid oxygen diffusion to enhance fitness of a yeast model of multicellularity.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Impact of ontogeny and spines on the hydrodynamic performance of the Cambrian arthropodRoyal Society open science · 2024Article
- Opportunity begets opportunity to drive macroevolutionary dynamics of a diverse lizard radiation.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- Navigating uncertainty in maximum body size in marine metazoans.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Physical constraints during Snowball Earth drive the evolution of multicellularity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Crosstalk between oxygen signaling and iron metabolism in renal interstitial fibroblasts.Journal of clinical biochemistry and nutrition · 2024Article
- Body-size evolution in gastropods across the Plio-Pleistocene extinction in the western Atlantic.PloS one · 2024Article
- The extinct marine megafauna of the Phanerozoic.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2024Review
- Examining the role of oxygen-binding proteins on the early evolution of multicellularity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- The origin of eukaryotes and rise in complexity were synchronous with the rise in oxygen.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2023Article
- Extreme variability in atmospheric oxygen levels in the late Precambrian.Science advances · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The maximum size of organisms has increased enormously since the initial appearance of life >3.5 billion years ago (Gya), but the pattern and timing of this size increase is poorly known. Consequently, controls underlying the size spectrum of the global biota have been difficult to evaluate. Our period-level compilation of the largest known fossil organisms demonstrates that maximum size increased by 16 orders of magnitude since life first appeared in the fossil record. The great majority of the increase is accounted for by 2 discrete steps of approximately equal magnitude: the first in the middle of the Paleoproterozoic Era (approximately 1.9 Gya) and the second during the late Neoproterozoic and early Paleozoic eras (0.6-0.45 Gya). Each size step required a major innovation in organismal complexity--first the eukaryotic cell and later eukaryotic multicellularity. These size steps coincide with, or slightly postdate, increases in the concentration of atmospheric oxygen, suggesting latent evolutionary potential was realized soon after environmental limitations were removed.
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