ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Does exceptional preservation distort our view of disparity in the fossil record?
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Early sarcopterygian morphological disparity through the Devonian-Carboniferous crisis.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Unravelling the drivers of marine biodiversity across the Phanerozoic.Nature communications · 2025Article
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- The Fundamental Role of Character Coding in Bayesian Morphological Phylogenetics.Systematic biology · 2024Article
- Morphological innovation did not drive diversification in Mesozoic-Cenozoic brachiopods.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Fossilization can mislead analyses of phenotypic disparity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Article
- The early diversification of ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii): hypotheses, challenges and future prospects.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Article
- Article
- Phylogenetic Signal and Bias in Paleontology.Systematic biology · 2022Article
- An exceptionally preserved Sphenodon-like sphenodontian reveals deep time conservation of the tuatara skeleton and ontogeny.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Sauropodomorph evolution across the Triassic-Jurassic boundary: body size, locomotion, and their influence on morphological disparity.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Article
- Article
- Megaevolutionary dynamics and the timing of evolutionary innovation in reptiles.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Early high rates and disparity in the evolution of ichthyosaurs.Communications biology · 2020Article
- Does exceptional preservation distort our view of disparity in the fossil record?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
How much of evolutionary history is lost because of the unevenness of the fossil record? Lagerstätten, sites which have historically yielded exceptionally preserved fossils, provide remarkable, yet distorting insights into past life. When examining macroevolutionary trends in the fossil record, they can generate an uneven sampling signal for taxonomic diversity; by comparison, their effect on morphological variety (disparity) is poorly understood. We show here that lagerstätten impact the disparity of ichthyosaurs, Mesozoic marine reptiles, by preserving higher diversity and more complete specimens. Elsewhere in the fossil record, undersampled diversity and more fragmentary specimens produce spurious results. We identify a novel effect, that a taxon moves towards the centroid of a Generalized Euclidean dataset as its proportion of missing data increases. We term this effect 'centroid slippage', as a disparity-based analogue of phylogenetic stemward slippage. Our results suggest that uneven sampling presents issues for our view of disparity in the fossil record, but that this is also dependent on the methodology used, especially true with widely used Generalized Euclidean distances. Mitigation of missing cladistic data is possible by phylogenetic gap filling, and heterogeneous effects of lagerstätten on disparity may be accounted for by understanding the factors affecting their spatio-temporal distribution.
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