Telling the Evolutionary Time: Molecular Clocks and the Fossil Record

considerable uncertainty about basal Cambrian correlation, and the likelihood that some Cambrian rocks contain ‘Ediacaran’ fossi ...

degree of bioturbation in the Proterozoic and earliest Cambrian, both in terms of intensity and depth, arguably resulted in sedi ...

be not casts but sediment accumulations glued by mucus. In order for these originally positive-relief structures to be preserved ...

the ends) of taxon ranges. At the origin of a clade, it is standard dogma that there can be only a small founder population, and ...

imply in turn having a model that links abundance to diversity during an evolutionary radiation. In part, this link may depend o ...

the trap of assuming that similar features must be convergent, a tendency recognized long ago in the memorable words of Derek Ag ...

heretical ‘neutralist’ theories of both ecologists and palaeontologists. The ecological theory claims that diversity and phenoty ...

setting before and after the bilaterian expansion, and the cnidarian/sponge thickets that would have constituted benthic ecology ...

Testing the Cambrian explosion: some approaches We have argued above that the Cambrian explosion needs to be considered in its m ...

examination of post-extinction intervals in order to distinguish between the various possibilities that could account for the te ...

The broad faunal succession of the Cambrian explosion Recent reassessment of terminal Proterozoic biotas has led to two importan ...

The overall faunal succession of the Precambrian-Cambrian interval therefore gives the impression of first yielding taxa of pori ...

Discussion Advocates of the gap between fossil and molecular evidence for the origin of major clades being explicable by the gen ...

For the Cambrian explosion, the alleged gap is so large that many possible explanations seem extremely unlikely. Table 9.1 Data ...

We have argued previously (Budd and Jensen 2000) that the likelihood of the lack of convincing Precambrian crown-group bilateria ...

molecular evolution (e.g. Bromham et al. 2000), Aris-Brosou and Ziheng Yang (2000), using a Bayesian approach on 18S rRNA data, ...

Acknowledgements G.E.B. acknowledges support from the Swedish Scientific Research Council (VR), and S.J. acknowledges support fr ...

Butterfield, N.J. (1997) ‘Plankton ecology and the Proterozoic-Phanerozoic transition’, Paleobiology, 23:247–62. —— (2000) ‘Bang ...

Dzik, J. and Ivantsov, A.Y. (2002) ‘Internal anatomy of a new Precambrian dickinsoniid dipleurozoan from northern Russia’, Neues ...

Huelsenbeck, J.P. (1994) ‘Comparing the stratigraphic record to estimates of phylogeny’, Paleobiology, 20:470–83. Huelsenbeck, J ...