Evolutionary paleoecologists have proposed many explanations for Phanerozoic trends in ecospace utilization, including escalation, seafood through time, filling of an empty ecospace, and tiering, among others. These hypotheses can be generalized into four models of functional diversification within a life-habit ecospace framework (functional-trait space). The models also incorporate concepts in community assembly, functional diversity, evolutionary diversification, and morphological disparity. The redundancy model produces an ecospace composed of clusters of functionally similar taxa. The partitioning model produces an ecospace that is progressively subdivided by taxa along life-habit gradients. The expansion model produces an ecospace that becomes progressively enlarged by the accumulation of taxa with novel life habits. These models can be caused by a wide range of ecological and evolutionary processes, but they are all caused by particular “driven” mechanisms. A fourth, neutral model also exists, in which ecospace is filled at random by life habits: this model can serve as a passive null model. Each model produces distinct dynamics for functional diversity/disparity statistics when simulated by stochastic simulations of ecospace diversification. In this first of two companion articles, I summarize the theoretical bases of these models, describe their expected statistical dynamics, and discuss their relevance to important paleoecological trends and theories. Although most synoptic interpretations of Phanerozoic ecological history invoke one or more of the driven models, I argue that this conclusion is premature until tests are conducted that provide better statistical support for them over simpler passive models.

The Paleobiology Database (PBDB; https://paleobiodb.org) consists of geographically and temporally explicit, taxonomically identified fossil occurrence data. The taxonomy utilized by the PBDB is not static, but is instead dynamically generated using an algorithm applied to separately managed taxonomic authority and opinion data. The PBDB owes its existence to many individuals, some of whom have entered more than 1.26 million fossil occurrences and over 570,000 taxonomic opinions, and some of whom have developed and maintained supporting infrastructure and analysis tools. Here, we provide an overview of the data model currently used by the PBDB and then briefly describe how this model is exposed via an Application Programming Interface (API). Our objective is to outline how PBDB data can now be accessed within individual scientific workflows, used to develop independently managed educational and scientific applications, and accessed to forge dynamic, near real-time connections to other data resources.

Biotic invasions in the fossil record provide natural experiments for testing hypotheses of niche stability, speciation, and the assembly and diversity of regional biotas. We compare ecological parameters (preferred environment, occupancy, median abundance, rank abundance) of genera shared between faunal provinces during the Richmondian Invasion in the Late Ordovician on the Laurentian continent. Genera that spread from one faunal province to the other during the invasion (invading shared genera) have high Spearman rank correlations (>0.5) in three of four ecological parameters, suggesting a high level of niche stability among invaders. Genera that existed in both regions prior to and following the invasion (noninvading shared genera) have low correlations (<0.3) and suggest niche shift between lineages that diverged at least 8 Myr earlier. Niche shift did not accumulate gradually over this time interval but appears to have occurred in a pulse associated with the onset of the Taconic orogeny and the switch from warm-water to cool-water carbonates in southern Laurentia.

Mesozoic marine ecosystems were dominated by several clades of reptiles, including sauropterygians, ichthyosaurs, crocodylomorphs, turtles, and mosasaurs, that repeatedly invaded ocean ecosystems. Previous research has shown that marine reptiles achieved great taxonomic diversity in the Middle Triassic, as they broadly diversified into many feeding modes in the aftermath of the Permo-Triassic mass extinction, but it is not known whether this initial phase of evolution was exceptional in the context of the entire Mesozoic. Here, we use a broad array of disparity, morphospace, and comparative phylogenetic analyses to test this. Metrics of ecomorphology, including functional disparity in the jaws and dentition and skull-size diversity, show that the Middle to early Late Triassic represented a time of pronounced phenotypic diversification in marine reptile evolution. Following the Late Triassic extinctions, diversity recovered, but disparity did not, and it took over 100 Myr for comparable variation to recover in the Campanian and Maastrichtian. Jurassic marine reptiles generally failed to radiate into vacated functional roles. The signatures of adaptive radiation are not seen in all marine reptile groups. Clades that diversified during the Triassic biotic recovery, the sauropterygians and ichthyosauromorphs, do show early diversifications, early high disparity, and early burst, while less support for these models is found in thalattosuchian crocodylomorphs and mosasaurs. Overall, the Triassic represented a special interval in marine reptile evolution, as a number of groups radiated into new adaptive zones.

Models of functional ecospace diversification within life-habit frameworks (functional-trait spaces) are increasingly used across community ecology, functional ecology, and paleoecology. In general, these models can be represented by four basic processes, three that have driven causes and one that occurs through a passive process. The driven models include redundancy (caused by forms of functional canalization), partitioning (specialization), and expansion (divergent novelty), but they also share important dynamical similarities with the passive neutral model. In this second of two companion articles, Monte Carlo simulations of these models are used to illustrate their basic statistical dynamics across a range of data structures and implementations. Ecospace frameworks with greater numbers of characters (functional traits) and ordered (multistate) character types provide more distinct dynamics and greater ability to distinguish the models, but the general dynamics tend to be congruent across all implementations. Classification-tree methods are proposed as a powerful means to select among multiple candidate models when using multivariate data sets. Well-preserved Late Ordovician (type Cincinnatian) samples from the Kope and Waynesville formations are used to illustrate how these models can be inferred in empirical applications. Initial simulations overestimate the ecological disparity of actual assemblages, confirming that actual life habits are highly constrained. Modifications incorporating more realistic assumptions (such as weighting potential life habits according to actual frequencies and adding a parameter controlling the strength of each model’s rules) provide better correspondence to actual assemblages. Samples from both formations are best fit by partitioning (and to lesser extent redundancy) models, consistent with a role for local processes. When aggregated as an entire formation, the Kope Formation pool remains best fit by the partitioning model, whereas the entire Waynesville pool is better fit by the redundancy model, implying greater beta diversity within this unit. The ‘ecospace’ package is provided to implement the simulations and to calculate their dynamics using the R statistical language.

The end-Permian mass extinction, the largest extinction of the Phanerozoic, led to a severe reduction in both taxonomic richness and ecological complexity of marine communities, eventually culminating in a dramatic ecological restructuring of communities. During the Early Triassic recovery interval, disaster taxa proliferated and numerically dominated many marine benthic invertebrate assemblages. These disaster taxa include the bivalve genera Claraia, Unionites, Eumorphotis, and Promyalina, and the inarticulate brachiopod Lingularia. The exact nature and extent of their dominance remains uncertain. Here, a quantitative analysis of the dominance of these taxa within the fossil communities of Panthalassa and Tethys benthic realms is undertaken for the stages of the Early Triassic to examine temporal and regional changes in disaster-taxon dominance as recovery progresses. Community dominance and disaster-taxon abundance is markedly different between Panthalassic and Tethyan communities. In Panthalassa, community evenness is low in the Induan stage but increases significantly in the Smithian and Spathian. This is coincident with a significant decrease in the relative abundance and occurrence frequency of the disaster taxa, most notably of the low-oxygen-affinity taxa Claraia and Lingularia. While the disaster taxa are present in post-Induan assemblages, other taxa, including two articulate brachiopod genera, outrank the disaster taxa in relative abundance. In the Tethys, assemblages are generally more even than contemporaneous Panthalassic assemblages. We observe an averaged trend toward more even communities with fewer disaster taxa in both Panthalassic and Tethyan assemblages over time.

The mid-late Ediacaran Period (~579–541 Ma) is characterized by globally distributed marine soft-bodied organisms of unclear phylogenetic affinities colloquially called the “Ediacara biota.” Despite an absence of systematic agreement, previous workers have tested for underlying factors that may control the occurrence of Ediacaran macrofossils in space and time. Three taxonomically distinct “assemblages,” termed the Avalon, White Sea, and Nama, were identified and informally incorporated into Ediacaran biostratigraphy. After ~15 years of new fossil discoveries and taxonomic revision, we retest the validity of these assemblages using a comprehensive database of Ediacaran macrofossil occurrences. Using multivariate analysis, we also test the degree to which taphonomy, time, and paleoenvironment explain the taxonomic composition of these assemblages. We find that: (1) the three assemblages remain distinct taxonomic groupings; (2) there is little support for a large-scale litho-taphonomic bias present in the Ediacaran; and (3) there is significant chronostratigraphic overlap between the taxonomically and geographically distinct Avalonian and White Sea assemblages ca. 560–557 Ma. Furthermore, both assemblages show narrow bathymetric ranges, reinforcing that they were paleoenvironmental–ecological biotopes and spatially restricted in marine settings. Meanwhile, the Nama assemblage appears to be a unique faunal stage, defined by a global loss of diversity, coincident with a noted expansion of bathymetrically unrestricted, long-ranging Ediacara taxa. These data reinforce that Ediacaran biodiversity and stratigraphic ranges of its representative taxa must first statistically account for varying likelihood of preservation at a local scale to ultimately aggregate the Ediacaran macrofossil record into a global biostratigraphic context.

Hypotheses regarding the evolution of many clades are often generated in the absence of data from the fossil record and potential biases introduced by exclusion of paleontological data are frequently ignored. With regard to body size evolution, extinct taxa are frequently excluded because of the lack of body mass estimates—making identification of reliable clade specific body mass estimators crucial to evaluating trends on paleontological timescales. Herein, I identify optimal osteological dimensions for estimating body mass in extinct species of Pan-Alcidae (Aves, Charadriiformes) and utilize newly generated estimates of body mass to demonstrate that the combination of neontological and paleontological data produces results that conflict with hypotheses generated when extant species data are analyzed in isolation. The wing-propelled diving Pan-Alcidae are an ideal candidate for comparing estimates of body mass evolution based only on extant taxa with estimates generated including fossils because extinct species diversity (≥31 species) exceeds extant diversity, includes examples from every extant genera, and because phylogenetic hypotheses of pan-alcid relationships are not restricted to the 23 extant species. Phylogenetically contextualized estimation of body mass values for extinct pan-alcids facilitated evaluation of broad scale trends in the evolution of pan-alcid body mass and generated new data bearing on the maximum body mass threshold for aerial flight in wing-propelled divers. The range of body mass in Pan-Alcidae is found to exceed that of all other clades of Charadriiformes (shorebirds and allies) and intraclade body mass variability is recognized as a recurring theme in the evolution of the clade. Finally, comparisons of pan-alcid body mass range with penguins and the extinct †Plotopteridae elucidate potentially shared constraints among phylogenetically disparate yet ecologically similar clades of wing-propelled divers.

Changes in the physical environment are major drivers of evolutionary change, either through direct effects on the distribution and abundance of species or more subtle shifts in the outcome of biological interactions. To investigate this phenomenon, we built a fossil data set of drilling gastropod predation on bivalve prey for the last 11 Myr to determine how the regional collapse in Caribbean upwelling and planktonic productivity affected predator–prey interactions. Contrary to theoretical expectations, predation increased nearly twofold after productivity declined, while the ratio of drilling predators to prey remained unchanged. This increase reflects a gradual, several-fold increase in the extent of shallow-water coral reefs and seagrass meadows in response to the drop in productivity that extended over several million years. Drilling predation is uniformly higher in biogenic habitats than in soft sediments. Thus, changes in predation intensity were driven by a shift in dominant habitats rather than a direct effect of decreased productivity. Most previous analyses of predation through time have not accounted for variations in environmental conditions, raising questions about the patterns observed. More fundamentally, however, the consequences of large-scale environmental perturbations may not be instantaneous, especially when changes in habitat and other aspects of local environmental conditions cause cascading series of effects.

The sizes and shapes of marine organisms often vary systematically across latitude and water depth, but the environmental factors that mediate these gradients in morphology remain incompletely understood. A key challenge is isolating the individual contributions of many, often correlated, environmental variables of potential biological significance. Benthic foraminifera, a diverse group of rhizarian protists that inhabit nearly all marine environments, provide an unparalleled opportunity to test statistically among the various potential controls on size and volume–to–surface area ratio. Here, we use 7035 occurrences of 541 species of Rotallid foraminifera across 946 localities spanning more than 60 degrees of latitude and 1600 m of water depth around the North American continental margin to assess the relative influences of temperature, oxygen availability, carbonate saturation, and particulate organic carbon flux on their test volume and volume–to–surface area ratio. For the North American data set as a whole, the best model includes temperature and dissolved oxygen concentration as predictors. This model also applies to data from the Pacific continental margin in isolation, but only temperature is included in the best model for the Atlantic. Because these findings are consistent with predictions from the first principles of cell physiology, we interpret these statistical associations as the expressions of physiological selective pressures on test size and shape from the physical environment. Regarding existing records of temporal variation in foraminiferal test size across geological time in light of these findings suggests that the importance of temperature variation on the evolution of test volume and volume–to–surface area ratio may be underappreciated. In particular, warming may have played as important a role as reduced oxygen availability in causing test size reduction during past episodes of environmental crisis and is expected to inflict metabolic stress on benthic foraminifera over the next century due to anthropogenic climate change.

Numerous methods exist for estimating the true stratigraphic range of a fossil taxon based on the stratigraphic positions of its fossil occurrences. Many of these methods require the assumption of uniform fossil recovery potential—that fossils are equally likely to be found at any point within the taxon's true range. This assumption is unrealistic, because factors such as stratigraphic architecture, sampling effort, and the taxon's abundance and geographic range affect recovery potential. Other methods do not make this assumption, but they instead require a priori quantitative knowledge of recovery potential that may be difficult to obtain. We present a new Bayesian method, the Adaptive Beta method, for estimating the true stratigraphic range of a taxon that works for both uniform and non-uniform recovery potential. In contrast to existing methods, we explicitly estimate recovery potential from the positions of the occurrences themselves, so that a priori knowledge of recovery potential is not required. Using simulated datasets, we compare the performance of our method with existing methods. We show that the Adaptive Beta method performs well in that it achieves or nearly achieves nominal coverage probabilities and provides reasonable point estimates of the true extinction in a variety of situations. We demonstrate the method using a dataset of the Cambrian mollusc Anabarella.

The Tulip Beds locality on Mount Stephen (Yoho National Park, British Columbia) yields one of the most abundant and diverse (~10,000 specimens in 110 taxa) Burgess Shale fossil assemblages in the Canadian Rockies. Detailed semi quantitative and quantitative analyses of this assemblage suggest strong similarities with the Walcott Quarry on Fossil Ridge. Both assemblages are dominated by epibenthic, sessile, and suspension feeding taxa, mostly represented by arthropods and sponges and have comparable diversity patterns, despite sharing only about half the genera. However, the Tulip Beds has a higher relative abundance of suspension feeders and taxa of unknown affinity compared to the Walcott Quarry. These biotic variations are probably largely attributable to ecological and evolutionary differences between the two temporally distinct communities that adapted to similar, but not identical, environmental settings. For instance, the Tulip Beds is farther away from the Cathedral Escarpment than the Walcott Quarry. The Tulip Beds and Walcott Quarry assemblages are more similar to each other than either one is to the assemblages of the Chengjiang biota, although the relative diversity of major taxonomic groups and ecological patterns are similar in all assemblages. The conserved diversity patterns and ecological structures among sites suggest that the ecological composition of Cambrian Burgess Shale-type communities was relatively stable across wide geographic and temporal scales.

Although provinces are widely used to delimit large-scale variations in biotic composition, it is unknown to what extent such variations simply reflect large-scale gradients, much as has been shown at smaller scales for communities. We examine here whether four previously described Middle and Late Ordovician provinces on Laurentia are best described as distinct provinces or as biotic gradients through a combination of the Paleobiology Database and new field data. Both data sets indicate considerable overlap in faunal composition, with spatial patterns in Jaccard similarity, quantified Jaccard similarity, and nonmetric multidimensional scaling ordination structure that correspond to variations in substrate type, specifically from carbonate-dominated strata in western Laurentia to mixed carbonate–siliciclastic strata in the midcontinent to siliciclastic-dominated rocks in easternmost Laurentia. Because sampling was limited to shallow-subtidal settings, this gradient cannot be attributed to variations in water depth. Likewise, geographic distance accounts for only a quarter of the variation in faunal composition. This cross-continent faunal gradient increases in strength into the early Late Ordovician, and appears to represent increased siliciclastic influx into eastern Laurentia during the Taconic orogeny. These results raise the question of whether biogeographic provinces may be in general better interpreted and analyzed as biotic gradients rather than as discrete entities.

Paleoecological studies enhance our understanding of biotic responses to climate change because they consider long timescales not accessible through observational and experimental studies. Using predatory drillholes produced on fossil bivalve shells by carnivorous gastropods, we provide an example of how climate change affected predator–prey interactions. We quantitatively examine temporal changes in fossil molluscan assemblages and predation patterns from the Pleistocene Japan Sea, which experienced drastic environmental changes in relation to glacial–interglacial climate cycles. We found significant changes in predation patterns associated with a decline in the abundance of warm-water molluscan species. Climate-mediated fluctuations in the eustatic sea level and resultant weakening of the Tsushima Warm Current caused a decline in a warm-water shell-drilling predator, which moderated the predation pressure and size relationship between the predators and the bivalve prey. Our results indicate that climate-mediated range shifts of species in present-day and future marine ecosystems can likewise increase altered predator–prey interactions.

Understanding the evolution of a Bauplan starts with discriminating phylogenetic signal from adaptation and the latter from exaptation in the observed biodiversity. Whether traits have predated, accompanied, or followed evolution of particular functions is the basic inference to establish the type of explanations required to determine morphological evolution. To accomplish this, we focus in a particular group of vertebrates, the anurans. Frogs and toads have a unique Bauplan among vertebrates, with a set of postcranial features that have been considered adaptations to jumping locomotion since their evolutionary origin. This interpretation is frequently stated but rarely tested in scientific literature. We test this assumption reconstructing the locomotor capabilities of the earliest known salientian, Triadobatrachus massinoti. This extinct taxon exhibits a mosaic of features that have traditionally been considered as representing an intermediate stage in the evolution of the anuran Bauplan, some of which were also linked to jumping skills. We considered T. massinoti in an explicit evolutionary framework by means of multivariate analyses and comparative phylogenetic methods. We used length measurements of major limb bones of 188 extant limbed amphibians (frogs and salamanders) and lizards as a morphological proxy of observed locomotor behavior. Our findings show that limb data correlate with locomotion, regardless of phylogenetic relatedness, and indicate that salamander-like lateral undulatory movements were the main mode of locomotion of T. massinoti. These results contrast with recent hypotheses and indicate that derived postcranial features that T. massinoti shared with anurans might have been later co-opted as exaptations in jumping frogs.

Age-frequency distributions of dead skeletal material on the landscape or seabed—information on the time that has elapsed since the death of individuals—provide decadal- to millennial-scale perspectives both on the history of production and on the processes that lead to skeletal disintegration and burial. So far, however, models quantifying the dynamics of skeletal loss have assumed that skeletal production is constant during time-averaged accumulation. Here, to improve inferences in conservation paleobiology and historical ecology, we evaluate the joint effects of temporally variable production and skeletal loss on postmortem age-frequency distributions (AFDs) to determine how to detect fluctuations in production over the recent past from AFDs. We show that, relative to the true timing of past production pulses, the modes of AFDs will be shifted to younger age cohorts, causing the true age of past pulses to be underestimated. This shift in the apparent timing of a past pulse in production will be stronger where loss rates are high and/or the rate of decline in production is slow; also, a single pulse coupled with a declining loss rate can, under some circumstances, generate a bimodal distribution. We apply these models to death assemblages of the bivalve Nuculana taphria from the Southern California continental shelf, finding that: (1) an onshore-offshore gradient in time averaging is dominated by a gradient in the timing of production, reflecting the tracking of shallow-water habitats under a sea-level rise, rather than by a gradient in disintegration and sequestration rates, which remain constant with water depth; and (2) loss-corrected model-based estimates of the timing of past production are in good agreement with likely past changes in local production based on an independent sea-level curve.

The highly elongated necks, and often tails, of sauropod dinosaurs were composed of concavo-convex vertebrae that provided stability without compromising mobility. Polarities of these concavo-convex joints in the neck and tail are anatomically opposite one another but mechanically equivalent. Opisthocoelous cervical vertebrae and procoelous caudal vertebrae have the convex articular face directed away from the body and the concave articular face directed toward the body. This “sauropod-type” polarity is hypothesized to be (1) more resistant to fracturing of the cotylar rim and (2) better stabilized against joint failure by rotation than the opposite polarity. We used physical models to test these two functional hypotheses. Photoelastic analysis of model centra loaded as cantilevers reveals that neither polarity better resists fracture of the cotylar rim; strain magnitude and localization are similar in both polarities. We assessed the rotational stability of concavo-convex joints using pairs of concavo-convex centra loaded near the joint. Sauropod-type joints withstood significantly greater weight before failure occurred, a pattern we interpret to be dependent on the position of the center of rotation, which is always within the convex part of the concavo-convex joint. In sauropod-type joints, the free centrum rotates about a center of rotation that lies within the more stable proximal centrum. In contrast, the opposite polarity results in a free centrum that rotates about an internal point; when the condyle rotates down and out of joint, the distal end rotates back toward the body, unopposed by ligamentous support. Sauropod-type joints remained stable with greater mobility, more mechanically advantageous tensile element insertions, and greater distal loads than the opposite polarity. The advantages conferred by this joint polarity would have facilitated the evolution of hyperelongated necks and tails by sauropods. Polarity of concavo-convex joints of the appendicular skeleton (e.g., hip, shoulder) is also consistent with the demands of rotational stability.

We explore the relationships among the geographic ranges of genera, the ranges and positions of their constituent species, and the number of species they contain, considering variation among coeval genera and changes within genera over time. Measuring range size as the maximal distance, or extent, between occurrences within a taxon, we find that the range of the most widespread species is a good predictor of the range of the genus, and that the number of species is a better predictor still. This analysis is complicated by a forced correlation: the range of a genus must be at least as large as that of each of its constituent species. We therefore focus on a second measure of range, the mean squared distance, or dispersion, of occurrences from the geographic centroid, which, by analogy to the analysis of variance, allows the total dispersion of a genus to be compared to the mean within-species dispersion and the dispersion among species centroids. We find that among-species dispersion is the principal determinant of genus dispersion. Within-species dispersion also plays a major role. The role of species richness is relatively small. Our results are not artifacts of temporal variation in the geographic breadth of sampled data. The relationship between changes in genus dispersion and changes in within- and among-species dispersion shows a symmetry, being similar in cases when the genus range is expanding and when it is contracting. We also show that genera with greater dispersion have greater extinction resistance, but that within- and among-species dispersion are not demonstrable predictors of survival once the dispersion of the genus is accounted for. Thus it is the range of the genus, rather than how it is attained, that is most relevant to its fate. Species richness is also a clear predictor of survival, beyond its effects on geographic range.

It has generally been argued that the majority of fossil benthic foraminifera, the most common proxy for paleo bottom oceanic conditions, could not tolerate anoxia. Here we present evidence that fossil foraminifera were able to successfully colonize anoxic–dysoxic bottom waters, by using adaptations similar to those found in living species. Our study is based on a multi proxy micropaleontological and geochemical investigation of the Upper Cretaceous sediments from the Levant upwelling regime. A shift from buliminid to diverse trochospiral dominated assemblages was recorded in an interval with a distinct anoxic geochemical signature coinciding with a regional change in lithology. This change was triggered by an alteration in the type of primary producers from diatoms to calcareous nannoplankton, possibly causing modifications in benthic foraminiferal morphological and physiological adaptations to life in the absence of oxygen.

Our data show that massive blooms of triserial (buliminid) benthic foraminifera with distinct apertural and test morphologies during the Campanian were enabled by their ability to sequester diatom chloroplasts and associate with bacteria, in a similar manner as their modern analogs. Diverse trochospiral forms existed during the Maastrichtian by using nitrate instead of oxygen for their respiratory pathways in a denitrifying environment. Species belonging to the Stilostomellidae and Nodosariidae families might have been affected by the change in food type arriving to the seafloor after the phytoplankton turnover at the Campanian/Maastrichtian boundary, in a similar manner as their mid Pleistocene descendants prior to their extinction. This study promotes the need for a re-evaluation of the current models used for interpreting paleoceanographic data and demonstrates that the identification of adaptations and mechanisms involved in promoting sustained life under anoxic to dysoxic conditions should become a standard in faunal paleoceanographic studies.

Recent morphometric analysis revealed a juvenile (meraspid) axial growth gradient in the trunk of the ~429 Myr old trilobite Aulacopleura koninckii that resulted from growth control based on positional specification, as is common among extant organisms. Here we explore axial growth gradients in the more anterior body region, the cephalon, and in the cephalon and trunk during subsequent development in the holaspid period. We detected an axial growth gradient in the cephalon in the meraspid period, flatter and opposite in direction to that of the trunk, which also persisted during the holaspid period. We also found an holaspid trunk growth gradient, with a different distribution of growth rates among segments than that of the meraspid period. These newly observed growth gradients are compatible with the mechanism of growth control inferred for the meraspid trunk. Thus, the same kind of growth control may have operated in both body regions and during the whole ontogeny of A. koninckii. This study, along with others on the same species that preceded it, show that morphometric analysis of appropriate data sets can address questions of high interest for evolutionary developmental biology using data from fossils. By revealing developmental features at deep nodes of the phylogenetic tree, these studies will elucidate both how developmental processes evolved and how they themselves affected the evolution of organismal body patterning.