ReviewCommunications biology2022
Reassessing a cryptic history of early trilobite evolution.
Review in Communications biology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolutionary Tempo, Supertaxa, and Living Fossils.Systematic biology · 2025Article
- Combining fossil taxa with and without morphological data improves dated phylogenetic analyses.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Cambrian radiation speciation events driven by sea level and redoxcline changes on the Siberian Craton.Science advances · 2023Article
- Cambrian origin but no early burst in functional disparity for Class Bivalvia.Biology letters · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Trilobites are an iconic Paleozoic group of biomineralizing marine euarthropods that appear abruptly in the fossil record (c. 521 million years ago) during the Cambrian 'explosion'. This sudden appearance has proven controversial ever since Darwin puzzled over the lack of pre-trilobitic fossils in the Origin of Species, and it has generally been assumed that trilobites must have an unobserved cryptic evolutionary history reaching back into the Precambrian. Here we review the assumptions behind this model, and suggest that a cryptic history creates significant difficulties, including the invocation of rampant convergent evolution of biomineralized structures and the abandonment of the synapomorphies uniting the clade. We show that a vicariance explanation for early Cambrian trilobite palaeobiogeographic patterns is inconsistent with factors controlling extant marine invertebrate distributions, including the increasingly-recognized importance of long-distance dispersal. We suggest that survivorship bias may explain the initial rapid diversification of trilobites, and conclude that the group's appearance at c. 521 Ma closely reflects their evolutionary origins.
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