ArticleBioscience2018
Rethinking Living Fossils.
Article in Bioscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 17 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Soaring Systematics: An Evaluation of Biogeography and Flight Behavior in Dragonflies and Damselflies (Insecta: Odonata) Using Phylogenomics.Systematic biology · 2026Article
- Remote homology and functional genetics unmask deeply preserved Scm3/HJURP orthologs in metazoans.Science advances · 2026Article
- Genomic Distortion of Jawed Vertebrate Phylogeny.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Remote homology and functional genetics unmask deeply preserved Scm3/HJURP orthologs in metazoans.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Stable genome structures in living fossil fishes.Genome research · 2026Article
- Combining soft-bodied and three-dimensional fossils to reveal evolutionary modifications in early lingulellotretid brachiopods.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Living Fossil: A Metaphor's Travels Across Popular Culture and the Foundations of Darwinian Evolution and Anthropology.Journal of the history of biology · 2025Article
- Phylogenetic Biodiversity Metrics Should Account for Both Accumulation and Attrition of Evolutionary Heritage.Systematic biology · 2024Article
- Conservation genomics provides insights into genetic resilience and adaptation of the endangered Chinese hazelnut,Plant diversity · 2024Article
- Genomic data and ecological niche modeling reveal an unusually slow rate of molecular evolution in the Cretaceous Eupteleaceae.Science China. Life sciences · 2024Article
- Disparity of cycad leaves dispels the living fossil metaphor.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Evaluating the Accuracy of Methods for Detecting Correlated Rates of Molecular and Morphological Evolution.Systematic biology · 2023Article
- Hidden species diversity in an iconic living fossil vertebrate.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Species delimitation and coexistence in an ancient, depauperate vertebrate clade.BMC ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Giant gar from directly above the Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary suggests healthy freshwater ecosystems existed within thousands of years of the asteroid impact.Biology letters · 2022Article
- COVID-19 and iron dysregulation: distant sequence similarity between hepcidin and the novel coronavirus spike glycoprotein.Biology direct · 2020Article
- Genomic insights into historical population dynamics, local adaptation, and climate change vulnerability of the East Asian Tertiary relictEvolutionary applications · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biologists would be mistaken if they relegated living fossils to paleontological inquiry or assumed that the concept is dead. It is now used to describe entities ranging from viruses to higher taxa, despite recent warnings of misleading inferences. Current work on character evolution illustrates how analyzing living fossils and stasis in terms of parts (characters) and wholes (e.g., organisms and lineages) advances our understanding of prolonged stasis at many hierarchical levels. Instead of viewing the concept's task as categorizing living fossils, we show how its primary role is to mark out what is in need of explanation, accounting for the persistence of both molecular and morphological traits. Rethinking different conceptions of living fossils as specific hypotheses reveals novel avenues for research that integrate phylogenetics, ecological and evolutionary modeling, and evo-devo to produce a more unified theoretical outlook.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.