Postdoctoral Fellowship: EAR-PF: Novel approaches to evaluating the quality of the global fossil record: the frontier between taphonomy and phylogenetics

Fossils captivate our imaginations, especially the spectacularly preserved specimens that decorate the exhibit halls of museums around the world. These remarkably complete remains of ancient life on display offer us some of the best clues regarding what earth was like in our prehistoric past. But behind the scenes in museum collections lie vast treasure troves of valuable scientific information preserved in the less complete fossils that often never see the public eye.

Although many of these specimens aren’t much to look at, they nevertheless have the potential to provide scientists with a wealth of biological, ecological, and evolutionary information to help us better understand the history of life on Earth. However, paleontologists are still trying to figure out how to best incorporate them into broader studies of evolutionary relationships (a.k.a. phylogenetic analyses), or whether to incorporate them at all.

This novel study seeks to test the traditionally-held hypothesis that incomplete fossils (which represent the majority of known extinct biodiversity) contain less reliable evolutionary information than their more complete counterparts. PI Woolley will carry out a first-of-its-kind sampling of the terrestrial and marine fossil records to uncover potential universal patterns in the preservation of phylogenetic information of disparate branches on the animal Tree of Life: corals, sea urchins, birds, and squamates (e.g., lizards, snakes, and their relatives).

The survey will integrate specimen-based data held in natural history museum collections around the world with a series of phylogenetic comparative methods, metrics, and tests to determine the effects of exceptional and not-so-exceptional fossil preservation on our ability to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of ancient organisms in Deep Time. This is exciting and necessary work, because results generated from this research increase the scientific value of incomplete specimens housed in museum collections within the United States and abroad, and allow us to include more of Earth’s extinct biodiversity as we continue to piece together the past.

And the more complete our picture of the past is, the more capable we will be in accurately predicting and managing changes in today’s ecosystems as our planet continues to warm.

This project supports PI Woolley’s postdoctoral research at a critical but largely ignored intersection of paleobiological inquiry: taphonomy and phylogenetics. It is also a project that is rooted in institutions situated at STEM’s most accessible public-facing interface: natural history museums. The goal of this project is to apply phylogenetic comparative methods developed during PI Woolley’s PhD to characterize the quality of the observed fossil record of ecologically significant animal groups through space and time.

The project will center on characterizing the biases and completeness of the fossil records of corals, echinoids, squamates, and birds, and then assessing the phylogenetic information content of these biased records, and thus our ability to infer evolutionary relationships. The principles of this project unite disciplines within Paleobiology that rarely overlap: 1) marine and terrestrial sedimentological realms; 2) invertebrate and vertebrate paleontology; 3) taphonomy and phylogenetics.

As a result, this deliberately global, cross-disciplinary, first-of-its-kind research directly addresses the theme of the solicitation: “issues relating to scale”. This project examines how the fossil record is filtered through geologic, taphonomic, and anthropogenic collecting biases that are present at local scales within museum collections, to global scales with aggregated collections databases like the Paleobiology Database.

By assessing the capacity of a biased and fragmentary fossil record to retain information about evolutionary relationships, a groundwork can be established for incorporating the vast bulk of the fossil record into more synthetic paleobiological analyses of biodiversity patterns through time. Characterizing fossil record biases across such a disparate sampling of ecologically significant animal groups will also allow us to tease apart record biases that are clade-, environment-, region-, or time-dependent, versus those that may be more ubiquitous to fossil preservation in general, thus providing a critical large-scale context for future taphonomic studies and assessments of fossil record quality.

In addition to supporting the early career researcher PI Woolley, this project will be incorporated into public-facing museum programming, college course modules, and undergraduate and post-baccalaureate mentoring and training. Ultimately, a greater understanding of how bias affects the quality of fossil records at multiple planes will also provide improved contextual data to predict and manage the current biotic crisis on land and in the ocean.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.