Understanding the long-term effects of ongoing global environmental change on marine
ecosystems requires a cross-disciplinary approach. Deep-time and recent fossil records can …

Palaeontologists often ask identical questions to those asked by ecologists. Despite this,
ecology is considered a core discipline of conservation biology, while palaeontologists are …

Assessing extinction risk from climate drivers is a major goal of conservation science. Few
studies, however, include a long-term perspective of climate change. Without explicit …

Aim Poleward migration is a clear response of marine organisms to current global warming
but the generality and geographical uniformity of this response are unclear. Marine fossils …

Fundamental ecological and evolutionary theories, such as community saturation and
diversity-dependent diversification, assume that biotic competition restricts resource use …

The Cambrian saw a dramatic increase in metazoan diversity and abundance. Between-
assemblage diversity (beta diversity) soared in the first three Cambrian stages, suggesting a …

Extinction is a key feature of the evolutionary history of life, and assessments of extinction
risk are essential for the effective protection of biodiversity. The goal in assembling this …

The fitness of groups is often considered to be the average fitness among constituent
members. This assumption has been useful for developing models of multilevel selection …

A tenet of conservation palaeobiology is that knowledge of past extinction patterns can help
us to better predict future extinctions. Although the future is unobservable, we can test the …

The clade dynamics of marine animals have changed markedly over the Phanerozoic. Long-
term diversification is associated with decreasing origination and extinction rates, and with …