żyrafy-i-kopytne: Fossil

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

A fossil (from Classical Latin fossilis, lit. 'obtained by digging') is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved in amber, hair, petrified wood and DNA remnants. The totality of fossils is known as the fossil record. Though the fossil record is incomplete, numerous studies have demonstrated that there is enough information available to give a good understanding of the pattern of diversification of life on Earth, and it can fill gaps in our understanding of the sequence of evolution on earth. Paleontology includes the study of fossils:…

Evidence: 65 • authority: 92

Evidence: 49 • authority: 88

Evidence: 49 • authority: 72

The timeline of life represents the current scientific theory outlining the major events during the development of life on Earth. Dates in this article are consensus estimates based on scientific evidence, mainly fossils. In biology, evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organization, from kingdoms to species, and individual organisms and molecules, such as DNA and proteins. The similarities between all present day organisms imply a common ancestor from which all known species, living and extinct, have diverged. More than 99 percent of all sp…

Evidence: 47 • authority: 92

Ecological and genomic signatures of the convergent evolution of planktivory in fossil and living reef fishes over deep time.. Transitions from benthic to pelagic habitats often coincide with shifts in diet, yet the genomic basis and macroevolutionary dynamics of these changes remain poorly understood. Surgeonfishes and allies (Acanthuriformes), with their rich fossil record, dietary diversity, and compact genomes, provide a powerful model to investigate these transitions across deep time. We integrate genomic data from 80 extant species with morphological data from 32 fossils to construct total-evidence, tip-dated phylogenomic trees and reconstruct ancestral diets and geographic ranges. We…

Evidence: 47 • authority: 92

Evidence: 44 • authority: 88

The completeness of the continental fossil record and its impact on patterns of diversification. Did organisms diversify in different ways on land and in the marine realm over the Phanerozoic, or do the different diversification curves of continental and marine organisms reflect primarily methodological artifacts? To answer this question, a quantitative assessment of the completeness of the global continental fossil record is indispensable. We used comparisons between continental and marine fossil diversity and between past and present-day patterns of continental diversity to assess the absolute and relative completeness of the continental fossil record. Collector's curves of the number of…

Evidence: 44 • authority: 92

Fossil record biases skew inferences of mammal trait evolution.. The fossil record is key to elucidating past biodiversity dynamics, yet it remains incomplete and non-uniform, governed by factors such as sedimentation rates, species' range and body size, and sampling effort. How these biases distort inferences on evolutionary trends remains poorly understood. Here, we simulate a future fossil record of present-day land mammals to quantify the extent to which real evolutionary patterns can be recovered from fragmentary fossil data. Species are filtered according to sediment availability, species' range and body size, and spatial and taxonomic sampling biases under three preservation rates, a…

Evidence: 44 • authority: 72

The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the process of evolution from a common ancestor. The earliest clear evidence of life comes from biogenic carbon signatures and stromatolite fossils discovered in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks from western Greenland. In 2015, possible "remains of biotic life" were found in 4.1 billion-year-old rock…

Evidence: 42 • authority: 72

The Cambrian explosion (also known as the Cambrian radiation or Cambrian diversification) is an interval of time beginning approximately 538.8 million years ago in the Cambrian period of the early Paleozoic, during which a sudden radiation of complex life occurred. The fossil record of this period contains the first appearances of practically every animal phyla, implying that nearly all animal life has its origin during this radiation. It lasted between 13 and 25 million years and resulted in the divergence of most modern metazoan phyla. The event was accompanied by major diversification in other groups of organisms as well. Before early Cambrian diversification, most organisms were relativ…

Evidence: 42 • authority: 80

Evidence: 39 • authority: 80

Seedless Land Plants: Fossil Record, Evolution and Diversification