Ediacaran fronds are key components of terminal-Proterozoic ecosystems. They represent one of the most widespread and common body forms ranging across all major Ediacaran fossil localities and time slices postdating the Gaskiers glaciation, but uncertainty over their phylogenetic affinities has led to uncertainty over issues of homology and functional morphology between and within organisms displaying this ecomorphology. Here we present the first large-scale, multigroup cladistic analysis of Ediacaran organisms, sampling 20 ingroup taxa with previously asserted affinities to the Arboreomorpha, Erniettomorpha, and Rangeomorpha. Using a newly derived morphological character matrix that incorporates multiple axes of potential phylogenetically informative data, including architectural, developmental, and structural qualities, we seek to illuminate the evolutionary history of these organisms. We find strong support for existing classification schema and devise apomorphy-based definitions for each of the three frondose clades examined here. Through a rigorous cladistic framework it is possible to discern the pattern of evolution within and between these clades, including the identification of homoplasies and functional constraints. This work both validates earlier studies of Ediacaran groups and accentuates instances in which previous assumptions of their natural history are uninformative.

Throughout the late Quaternary, the Sahul (Pleistocene Australia–New Guinea) vertebrate fauna was dominated by a diversity of large mammals, birds, and reptiles, commonly referred to as megafauna. Since ca. 450–400Ka, approximately 88 species disappeared in Sahul, including kangaroos exceeding 200kg in size, wombat-like animals the size of hippopotamuses, flightless birds, and giant monitor lizards that were likely venomous. Ongoing debates over the primary cause of these extinctions have typically favored climate change or human activities. Improving our understanding of the population biology of extinct megafauna as more refined paleoenvironmental data sets become available will assist in identifying their potential vulnerabilities. Here, we apply a multiproxy approach to analyze fossil teeth from deposits dated to the middle and late Pleistocene at Cuddie Springs in southeastern Australia, assessing relative aridity via oxygen isotopes as well as vegetation and megafaunal diets using both carbon isotopes and dental microwear texture analyses. We report that the Cuddie Springs middle Pleistocene fauna was largely dominated by browsers, including consumers of C4 shrubs, but that by late Pleistocene times the C4 dietary component was markedly reduced. Our results suggest dietary restriction in more arid conditions. These dietary shifts are consistent with other independently derived isotopic data from eggshells and wombat teeth that also suggest a reduction in C4 vegetation after ~45 Ka in southeastern Australia, coincident with increasing aridification through the middle to late Pleistocene. Understanding the ecology of extinct species is important in clarifying the primary drivers of faunal extinction in Sahul. The results presented here highlight the potential impacts of aridification on marsupial megafauna. The trend to increasingly arid conditions through the middle to late Pleistocene (as identified in other paleoenvironmental records and now also observed, in part, in the Cuddie Springs sequence) may have stressed the most vulnerable animals, perhaps accelerating the decline of late Pleistocene megafauna in Australia.

Extensive investigation of the close association between biological diversity and environmental temperature has not yet yielded a generally accepted, empirically validated mechanism to explain latitudinal gradients of species diversity, which occur in most taxa. Using the highly resolved late Cenozoic fossil records of four major taxa of marine plankton, we show that their gradients arise as a consequence of asymmetric geographic range expansion rather than latitudinal variation in diversification rate, as commonly believed. Neither per capita speciation nor extinction rates trend significantly with temperature or latitude for these marine plankton. Species of planktonic foraminifera and calcareous nannoplankton that originate in the temperate zone preferentially spread toward and arrive earlier in the tropics to produce a normal gradient with tropical diversity peaks; by contrast, temperate-zone originating species of diatoms and radiolarians preferentially spread toward and arrive earlier in polar regions to produce reversed gradients with high-latitude diversity peaks. Our results suggest that temperature affects latitudinal diversity gradients chiefly by its effect on species’ range limits rather than on probabilities of speciation and extinction. We show that this mechanism also appears to operate in various multicellular taxa, thus providing a widely applicable explanation for the origin of latitudinal diversity gradients.

We investigate the association between geographic range and survival in Mesozoic marine animal genera. Previous work using data from the Paleobiology Database (paleobiodb.org) demonstrated greater survivorship overall among Phanerozoic genera that were widespread during their stage of first appearance, but this relationship did not hold during the Mesozoic. To explore this unexpected result, we consider geographic range in conjunction with temporal variation in survival and variation in survival among higher taxa. Because average range and average survival are negatively correlated among stages, for reasons that are still unclear, and because the data are heavily influenced by cephalopods, which include many wide-ranging and short-lived genera, the effect of geographic range on survival is obscured in the aggregate data. Thus, range is not a significant predictor of survival when data are analyzed in aggregate, but it does have a significant effect when variation in average range and average survival among stages and classes is taken into account. The best-fitting models combine range with both temporal and taxonomic heterogeneity as predictive factors. Moreover, when we take stage-to-stage variation into account, geographic range is an important predictor of survival within most classes. Cephalopod genera must be more widespread than genera in other classes for geographic range to significantly increase odds of survival, and factoring in survival heterogeneity of superfamilies further increases model fit, demonstrating a nested nature in the sensitivity of range and taxonomic aggregation.

Insects in the fossil record are generally preserved in lacustrine shales or in amber. For those in lacustrine shales, preservation is usually via keroginization or mineralization. Given the extended period of microbial decay required to generate ions for mineralization, there is a predicted inherent bias toward lower preservation quality for this pathway by most taphonomic indices compared with keroginization. This study tests this hypothesis by comparing multiple measures of preservation quality between sites with similar sedimentology in the Eocene Green River Formation of Colorado. Here, insects are either mineralized in iron oxides (likely after pyrite) at the Paleoburn site or keroginized at the Anvil Points site.

Generally, the prediction that keroginization preserves soft-bodied fossils with higher preservational quality than mineralization is affirmed, but with some caveats. Beetles, known for their robust cuticles, are proportionately more abundant at the Paleoburn site, but eight of the nine orders recorded are shared between sites. As predicted, insects show lower preservation fidelity at the Paleoburn site, but they also show higher degrees of disarticulation. This second bias should be acquired primarily during the biostratinomy stage, and not early diagenesis. Nonetheless, higher-energy biostratinomic conditions may be compatible with taphonomic conditions that promote mineralization over keroginization.

Comparing the inherent taphonomic bias of different preservation pathways is often difficult, since fossil deposits may be preserved millions of years or thousands of kilometers apart. By studying two different preservation pathways of insects within the same formation, we can affirm that keroginization does indeed preserve recalcitrant organic matter with higher quality than pyritization or iron-oxide mineralization. Additionally, some guidelines can be proposed concerning the body parts and taxa that can be compared, and for what purpose, when contrasting mineralized and keroginized soft-bodied deposits.

Vertebrate microfossil bonebeds (VMBs)—localized concentrations of small resilient vertebrate hard parts—are commonly studied to recover otherwise rarely found small-bodied taxa, and to document relative taxonomic abundance and species richness in ancient vertebrate communities. Analyses of taphonomic comparability among VMBs have often found significant differences in size and shape distributions, and thus considered them to be non-isotaphonomic. Such outcomes of “strict” statistical tests of isotaphonomy suggest discouraging limits on the potential for broad, comparative paleoecological reconstruction using VMBs. Yet it is not surprising that sensitive statistical tests highlight variations among VMB sites, especially given the general lack of clarity with regard to the definition of “strict” isotaphonomic comparability. We rigorously sampled and compared six VMB localities representing two distinct paleoenvironments (channel and pond/lake) of the Upper Cretaceous Judith River Formation to evaluate biases related to sampling strategies and depositional context. Few defining distinctions in bioclast size and shape are evident in surface collections, and most site-to-site comparisons of sieved collections are indistinguishable (p≤0.003). These results provide a strong case for taphonomic equivalence among the majority of Judith River VMBs, and bode well for future studies of paleoecology, particularly in relation to investigations of faunal membership and community structure in Late Cretaceous wetland ecosystems. The taphonomic comparability of pond/lake and channel-hosted VMBs in the Judith River Formation is also consistent with a formative model that contends that channel-hosted VMBs were reworked from pre-existing pond/lake assemblages, and thus share taphonomic history.

Among extant crinoids, the feather stars are the most diverse and occupy the greatest bathymetric range, being especially common in reef environments. Feather stars possess a variety of morphological, behavioral and physiological traits that have been hypothesized to be critical to their success, especially in their ability to cope with predation. However, knowledge of their predators is exceptionally scant, consisting primarily of circumstantial evidence of attacks by fishes. In this study the question whether regular echinoids, recently shown to consume stalked crinoids, also consume feather stars is explored. Aquarium observations indicate that regular echinoids find feather stars palatable, including feather stars known to be distasteful to fish, and that regular echinoids can capture and eat live feather stars, including those known to swim. Gut-content analyses of the echinoid Araeosoma fenestratum (Thomson, 1872), which is commonly observed with large populations of the feather star Koehlermetra porrecta (Carpenter, 1888) in video transects from marine canyons off the coast of France, revealed elements of feather stars in the guts of 6 of 13 individuals. The high proportion of crinoid material (up to 90%), and the presence of articulated crinoid skeletal elements in the gut of A. fenestratum, suggest that these echinoids consumed at least some live crinoids, although they may have also ingested some postmortem remains found in the sediment. Additionally, photographic evidence from the northeast Atlantic suggests that another regular echinoid, Cidaris cidaris (Linnaeus, 1758), preys on feather stars. Thus in spite of the broad suite of antipredatory adaptations, feather stars are today subject to predation by regular echinoids and may have been since the Mesozoic, when this group of crinoids first appeared.

A central premise of bioclimatic envelope modeling is the assumption of niche conservatism. Whereas such assumptions are testable in modern populations, it is unclear whether niche conservatism holds over deeper time spans and over very large geographic ranges. Hyaenids occupied a diversity of ecological niches over time and space, and until the end-Pleistocene they occurred in Europe and most of Asia, with Asian populations of Crocuta suggested as being genetically distinct from their closest living relatives. Further, little is known regarding whether and how the dietary ecology of extinct populations of Crocuta differed from those of their extant African counterparts. Here, we use a multiproxy approach to assess an assumption of conserved dietary ecology in late Pleistocene extant spotted hyenas via finite element analysis, dental microwear texture analysis, and a novel dental macrowear method (i.e., whether teeth are minimally, moderately, or extremely worn, as defined by degree of dentin exposure) proposed here. Results from finite element simulations of the masticatory apparatus of Chinese and African Crocuta demonstrate lower skull stiffness and higher stress in the orbital region of the former when biting with carnassial teeth, suggesting that Chinese Crocuta could not process prey with the same degree of efficiency as extant Crocuta crocuta. Dental microwear texture data further support this interpretation, as Chinese Crocuta have intermediate and indistinguishable complexity values (indicative of hard-object feeding) between the extant African lion (Panthera leo) and extant hyenas (C. crocuta, Hyaena hyaena, and Parahyaena brunnea), being most similar to the omnivorous P. brunnea. The use of dental macrowear to infer dietary behavior may also be possible in extinct taxa, as evinced by dietary correlations between extant African feliforms and dental macrowear assignments. Collectively, this multiproxy analysis suggests that Chinese Crocuta may have exhibited dietary behavior distinct from that of living C. crocuta, and assumptions of niche conservatism may mask significant dietary variation in species broadly distributed in time and space.

Chitinous arm hooks (onychites) of belemnoid coleoid cephalopods are widely distributed in Mesozoic sediments. Due to their relative abundance and variable morphology compared with the single, bullet-shaped, belemnite rostrum, arm hooks came into the focus of micropaleontologists as a promising index fossil group for the Jurassic–Cretaceous rock record and have been the target of functional, ecological, and phylogenetic interpretations in the past. Based on three well-preserved arm crowns of the Toarcian diplobelid Chondroteuthis wunnenbergi, we analyzed the shape of a total of 87 micro-hooks. The arm crown of Chondroteuthis is unique in having uniserial rather than biserial hooks. The first application of elliptic Fourier shape analysis to the arm weapons of belemnoid coleoids allows for the distinction of four micro-hook morphotypes and the quantification of shape variation within these morphotypes. Based on the best-preserved arm crown, we reconstructed the distribution of morphotypes within the arm crown and along a single arm. Our quantitative data support former observations that smaller hooks were found close to the mouth and at the most distal arm parts, while the largest hooks were found in the central part of the arm crown. Furthermore, we found a distinct arm differentiation, as not every arm was equipped with the same hook morphotype. Here, we report the functional specialization of the belemnoid arm crown for the first time and speculate about the potential function of the four morphotypes based on comparisons with modern cephalopods. Our analyses suggest a highly adapted functional morphology and intra-individual distribution of belemnoid hooks serving distinct purposes mainly during prey capture.

Sauropod bone histology has provided a great deal of insight into the life history of these enormous animals. However, because of high growth rates, annual growth rings are not common in sauropod long bones, so directly measuring growth rates and determining sexual maturity require alternative measures. Histological ontogenetic stages (HOS) have been established to describe the changes in bone histology through development for basal Macronaria and Diplodocoidea, and subsequently for Titanosauria. Despite this, the current HOS model is not able to discriminate bone tissues in late ontogeny, when sauropods had reached asymptotic size and continued to live into senescence but their long bones became extensively remodeled by secondary osteons and all primary bone was destroyed. Here we establish remodeling stages (RS) to characterize the Haversian bone development through ontogeny in eight sauropod taxa (Apatosaurinae, Giraffatitan brancai, Camarasaurus spp., Dicraeosaurus spp., Ampelosaurus atacis, Phuwiangosaurus sirindhornae, Magyarosaurus dacus, and Alamosaurus sanjuanensis) and find significant correlation of RS with corresponding femur length (CFL) for the studied taxa, with the exception of Dicraeosaurus and Magyarosaurus. Remodeling stages are based on the maximum number of observable generations of crosscutting osteons from the innermost, mid-, and outermost part of the cortex. The correlation with CFL indicates that secondary osteons present an ontogenetic signal that could extend the histological ontogenetic stages. Remodeling stages also provide additional insight into the changes in histology through ontogeny for Sauropoda. This method has the potential to be used in other taxa, such as thyreophorans and many ornithischians, that develop Haversian tissue through development.