Evolution And Extinction Rate Controls

Evolution and Extinction Rate Controls

"Displaced or tectonostratigraphic terranes comprise a huge portion of real estate in the North American Cordillera. Terranes are discrete, fault-bound blocks of regional extent, with rocks and fossils that differ to a great extent from those of adjacent blocks. The allochthonous nature of most terranes, relative to adjacent craton, is well established. When mapped, they resemble a collage of mixed rock types, tectonic styles, metamorphism, and volcanic origins--each part resembling the pieces of a puzzle. Terrane studies remain integral to understanding the geological evolution of western North America. Since the initiation of the concept summarized in 1979 by the late David L. Jones, the significance of fossils and stratigraphy has been key to solving the puzzle. Chapters of this book written by experts in their field, provide a sense of the diversity of approaches in paleontology and stratigraphy. Contributions span geologic time from the Precambrian (Vendian) to Cretaceous and address over 20 Cordilleran terranes."--Publisher's website.

This book is the culmination of many years of research by a scientist renowned for his work in this field. It contains a compilation of the data dealing with the known stratigraphic ranges of varied behaviors, chiefly animal with a few plant and fungal, and coevolved relations. A significant part of the data consists of ``frozen behavior'', i.e. those in which an organism has been preserved while actually ``doing'' something, as contrasted with the interpretations of behavior of an organism deduced from functional morphology, important as the latter may be. The conclusions drawn from this compilation suggest that both behaviors and coevolved relations appear infrequently, following which there is relative fixity of the relation, i.e., two rates of evolution, very rapid and essentially zero. This conclusion complies well with the author's prior conclusion that community evolution followed the same rate pattern. In fact, communities are regarded here, as in large part, expressions of both behavior and coevolved relations, rather than as random aggregates controlled almost wholly by varied, unrelated physical parameters tracked by organisms, i.e., the concept that communities have no biologic reality, being merely statistical abstractions. The book is illustrated throughout with more than 400 photographs and drawings. It will be of interest to ethologists, evolutionists, parasitologists, paleontologists, and palaeobiologists at research and post-graduate levels.

Representing the state of the art in evolutionary paleobiology, this book provides a much-needed overview of this rapidly changing field. An influx of ideas and techniques both from other areas of biology and from within paleobiology itself have resulted in numerous recent advances, including increased recognition of the relationships between ecological and evolutionary theory, renewed vigor in the study of ecological communities over geologic timescales, increased understanding of biogeographical patterns, and new mathematical approaches to studying the form and structure of plants and animals. Contributors to this volume—a veritable who's who of eminent researchers—present the results of original research and new theoretical developments, and provide directions for future studies. Individually wide ranging, these papers all share a debt to the work of James W. Valentine, one of the founders of modern evolutionary paleobiology. This volume's unified approach to the study of life on earth will be a major contribution to paleobiology, evolution, and ecology.

An expanded and updated second edition comprehensively looks at macroevolution, integrating evolutionary processes at all levels to explain animal diversity.

One of the most important questions we can ask about life is "Does ecology matter?" Most biologists and paleontologists are trained to answer "yes," but the exact mechanisms by which ecology matters in the context of patterns that play out over millions of years have never been entirely clear. This book examines these mechanisms and looks at how ancient environments affected evolution, focusing on long-term macroevolutionary changes as seen in the fossil record. Evolutionary paleoecology is not a new discipline. Beginning with Darwin, researchers have attempted to understand how the environment has affected evolutionary history. But as we learn more about these patterns, the search for a new synthetic view of the evolutionary process that integrates species evolution, ecology, and mass extinctions becomes ever more pressing. The present volume is a benchmark sampler of active research in this ever more active field.

Patterns of evolution, as illustrated by the fossil record