Douglas Erwin

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at Santa Fe Institute

Body size greatly affects how organisms interact with their environments. However, the macroevolutionary patterns of body size across many major metazoan clades and their constraining mechanisms remain elusive. A new high-resolution body size dataset covering 2435 species from 1091 genera of Cambrian and Ordovician trilobites reveals that body size...

That the activities of organisms influence their surrounding ecological communities, and the environment, has long been appreciated by palaeontologists, as has the role of these activities on both ecological and evolutionary processes. Spillover effects extend the range of ecosystem‐engineering through ecological networks, generating network effect...

The end-Permian mass extinction was the most severe ecological event during the Phanerozoic and has long been presumed contemporaneous across terrestrial and marine realms with global environmental deterioration triggered by the Siberian Traps Large Igneous Province. We present high-precision zircon U-Pb geochronology by the chemical abrasion–isoto...

Understanding the complex patterns of latitudinal diversity gradients (LDGs) in deep time has been hampered by the absence of long-term records of LDGs through multiple climatic changes. We used records of marine invertebrate fossils to generate LDGs in each age bin from the Carboniferous icehouse to the Triassic greenhouse climates. We evaluated L...

Cosmopolitanism represents the formation of globally homogenous biotas, usually of low-diversity, and normally form under unusual environmental conditions. But the factors driving such important biogeographic states remain unclear. The Carboniferous to Triassic encompasses the Late Paleozoic Ice Age (LPIA) and a hothouse beginning in the latest Per...

The Siberian Traps large igneous province (STLIP) is commonly invoked as the primary driver of global environmental changes that triggered the end-Permian mass extinction (EPME). Here, we explore the contributions of coeval felsic volcanism to end-Permian environmental changes. We report evidence of extreme Cu enrichment in the EPME interval in Sou...

Collective integration and processing of information have increased through the history of life, through both the formation of aggregates in which the entities may have very different properties and which jointly coarse-grained environmental variables (ranging from widely varying metabolism in microbial consortia to the ecological diversity of spec...

Constraining patterns of growth using directly observable and quantifiable characteristics can reveal a wealth of information regarding the biology of the Ediacara biota—the oldest macroscopic, complex community-forming organisms in the fossil record. However, these rely on individuals captured at an instant in time at various growth stages, and so...

Disentangling the factors underlying the appearance of macroscopic, often skeletonized, bilaterians during the Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of animals requires carefully parsing the contributions of ecological opportunity, environmental potential and developmental capacity. The early evolution of animals involved the introduction of genomic,...

The Ediacara Biota preserves the oldest fossil evidence of abundant, complex metazoans. Despite their significance, assigning individual taxa to specific phylogenetic groups has proved problematic. To better understand these forms, we identify developmentally controlled characters in representative taxa from the Ediacaran White Sea assemblage and c...

The Guadalupian Epoch is marked by the formation of the Pangean supercontinent, global sea-level change, rifting and drifting of the Cimmerian continents, formation of large igneous provinces and dramatic biotic changes. A high-resolution biostratigraphic, chemostratigraphic and high-precision geochronologic framework of this critical transition is...

Since 1990 the recognition of deep homologies among metazoan developmental processes and the spread of more mechanistic approaches to developmental biology have led to a resurgence of interest in evolutionary novelty and innovation. Other evolutionary biologists have proposed central roles for behaviour and phenotypic plasticity in generating the c...

Few topics in geobiology have been as extensively debated as the role of Earth's oxygenation in controlling when and why animals emerged and diversified. All currently described animals require oxygen for at least a portion of their life cycle. Therefore, the transition to an oxygenated planet was a prerequisite for the emergence of animals. Yet, o...

The long controversy over the importance of changes in the regulatory genome has been resolved with the recognition that such changes are a fundamental component of evolutionary dynamics. Comparative studies have revealed four dominant modes of change as the regulatory genome evolved: (1) the origin of regulatory novelties such as distal enhancers...

The origins and the early evolution of multicellular animals required the exploitation of holozoan genomic regulatory elements and the acquisition of new regulatory tools. Comparative studies of metazoans and their relatives now allow reconstruction of the evolution of the metazoan regulatory genome, but the deep conservation of many genes has led...

The Guadalupian Epoch was characterized by major changes in paleogeography, paleoclimate, and biodiversity. Yet, the paucity of precise and accurate radioisotopic dates from the Guadalupian stages in their type area, Guadalupe Mountains National Park in West Texas has rendered their calibration inadequate. In this study, we report high-precision U-...

A finer record of biodiversity We have pressing, human-generated reasons to explore the influence of environmental change on biodiversity. Looking into the past can not only inform our understanding of this relationship but also help us to understand current change. Paleontological records depend on fossil availability and predictive modeling, howe...

Over the past few years, interest in chromatin and its evolution has grown. To further advance these interests, we organized a workshop with the support of The Company of Biologists to debate the current state of knowledge regarding the origin and evolution of chromatin. This workshop led to prospective views on the development of a new field of re...

Novelty is a topic of broad interest, with two distinct approaches within evolutionary biology. The dominant approach since Darwin has been transformationist, with novelty arising through gradual changes in morphology. The Modern Synthesis emphasized the importance of ecological opportunity rather than the source of variation, and this view has man...

Steroid biomarkers show that the Ediacaran fossil Dickinsonia was an animal

Previous studies of the end-Permian mass extinction have established that it was geologically rapid, but condensed sections have made it difficult to establish the exact timing of the extinction relative to fluctuations in the ocean carbon cycle, oxygen levels, and temperature. Integrated high-precision U-Pb geochronology, biostratigraphy, and chem...

The Ediacaran–Cambrian (E–C) transition marks the most important geobiological revolution of the past billion years, including the Earth’s first crisis of macroscopic eukaryotic life, and its most spectacular evolutionary diversification. Here, we describe competing models for late Ediacaran extinction, summarize evidence for these models, and outl...

Eric Davidson had a deep and abiding interest in the role developmental mechanisms played in generating evolutionary patterns documented in deep time, from the origin of the euechinoids to the processes responsible for the morphological architectures of major animal clades. Although not an evolutionary biologist, Davidson’s interests long preceded...

Have the large-scale evolutionary patterns illustrated by the fossil record been driven by fluctuations in environmental opportunity, by biotic factors, or by changes in the types of phenotypic variants available for evolutionary change? Since the Modern Synthesis most evolutionary biologists have maintained that microevolutionary processes carryin...

Biological public goods are broadly shared within an ecosystem and readily available. They appear to be widespread and may have played important roles in the history of life on Earth. Of particular importance to events in the early history of life are the roles of public goods in the merging of genomes, protein domains and even cells. We suggest th...

Geological evidence indicates that grounded ice sheets reached sea level at all latitudes during two long-lived Cryogenian (58 and ≥5 My) glaciations. Combined uranium-lead and rhenium-osmium dating suggests that the older (Sturtian) glacial onset and both terminations were globally synchronous. Geochemical data imply that CO 2 was 10 2 PAL (presen...

Sewall Wright's fitness landscape introduced the concept of evolutionary spaces in 1932. George Gaylord Simpson modified this to an adaptive, phenotypic landscape in 1944 and since then evolutionary spaces have played an important role in evolutionary theory through fitness and adaptive landscapes, phenotypic and functional trait spaces, morphospac...

Environmental fluctuations in redox may reinforce rather than hinder evolutionary transitions, such that variability in near‐surface oceanic oxygenation can promote morphological evolution and novelty. Modern, low‐oxygen regions are heterogeneous and dynamic habitats that support low diversity and are inhabited by opportunistic and non‐skeletal met...

The last few years have seen a significant increase in the amount of data we have about the evolution of the arthropod body plan. This has come mainly from three separate sources: a new consensus and improved resolution of arthropod phylogeny, based largely on new phylogenomic analyses; a wealth of new early arthropod fossils from a number of Cambr...

The advent of greatly improved radiometric dating techniques with lower uncertainties, the development of new dating and correlation techniques, including vastly expanded quantitative biostratigraphic methods, and the possibility of reliable extension of orbital cyclostratigraphy into the Paleozoic all promise a great improvement in the ability of...

Cell types are the basic building blocks of multicellular organisms and are extensively diversified in animals. Despite recent advances in characterizing cell types, classification schemes remain ambiguous. We propose an evolutionary definition of a cell type that allows cell types to be delineated and compared within and between species. Key to ce...

Significance Earth is currently the only planet known to harbor complex life. Understanding whether terrestrial biotic complexity is a unique phenomenon or can be expected to be widespread in the universe depends on a mechanistic understanding of the factors that led to the emergence of complex life on Earth. Here, we use geochemical constraints an...

It has been proposed that the terminal Neoproterozoic Ediacara biota were driven to extinction by the evolution of metazoan groups capable of engineering their environments (the ‘biotic replacement’ model). However, evidence for an overlapping ecological association between metazoans and soft-bodied Ediacaran organisms is limited. Here, we describe...

Major components of the human ion trafficking system identified in the coral genomic data.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.13288.006

Taxonomic compilation and presence/absence in each taxon for genes involved in oxidative stress, DNA repair, cell cycle and apoptosis. The values in parentheses show the number of taxa in which the gene sequence was recovered in the genomic database. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.13288.022

Coral genomic data compiled in this study and their attributes.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.13288.004

Transcriptome and genome data from twenty stony coral species and a selection of reference bilaterians were studied to elucidate coral evolutionary history. We identified genes that encode the proteins responsible for the precipitation and aggregation of the aragonite skeleton on which the organisms live, and revealed a network of environmental sen...

The Subulitoidea have long been an enigmatic group of Paleozoic gastropods and share many characters of post-Paleozoic clades. Newly described protoconchs from several late Paleozoic subulitoid species have been employed in a phylogenetic analysis of the group. Late Paleozoic representatives, the Soleniscidae, are caenogastropods with an unornament...

The EARTHTIME Initiative was conceived by Sam Bowring and Doug Erwin in 2001 as a response to the advances being made in methods used to quantify time in the stratigraphic record. In the preceding decades the precision and resolution of radio-isotopic dating methods had improved significantly in parallel with increasingly quantitative analysis of t...

Recent molecular clock studies date the origin of Metazoa to 750–800 million years ago (Ma), roughly coinciding with evidence from geochemical proxies that oxygen levels rose from less than 0.1% present atmospheric level (PAL) to perhaps 1–3% PALO2. A younger origin of Metazoa would require greatly increased substitution rates across many clades an...

The fossil record provides striking case studies of biodiversity loss and global ecosystem upheaval. Because of this, many studies have sought to assess the magnitude of the current biodiversity crisis relative to past crises-a task greatly complicated by the need to extrapolate extinction rates. Here we challenge this approach by showing that the...

The extent of morphologic innovation during the Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of animals was unique in the history of metazoan life. This episode was also associated with extensive changes in the redox state of the oceans, in the structure of benthic and pelagic marine ecosystems, in the nature of marine sediments, and in the complexity of dev...

Fullerene (C60) have been reported in a number of geologic samples and, in some cases, attributed to carbonaceous materials delivered during bolide impact events. The extraction and detection of C60 poses significant analytical challenges, and some studies have been called into question due to the possibility of C60 forming in situ. Here, we extrac...

Eric Davidson made major contributions to elucidating the mechanisms and logical structure of developmental gene regulatory networks. The Norman Chandler Professor of Cell Biology at the California Institute of Technology, Eric died of a heart attack on 1 September 2015 in Pasadena, California. Eric's death came just a few months after the publicat...

The history of life as documented by the fossil record encompasses evolutionary diversifications at scales ranging from the Ediacaran-Cambrian explosion of animal life and the invasion of land by vascular plants, insects and vertebrates to the diversification of flowering plants over the past 100 million years and the radiation of horses. Morpholog...

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The latest Neoproterozoic extinction of the Ediacara biota has been variously attributed to catastrophic removal by perturbations to global geochemical cycles, 'biotic replacement' by Cambrian-type ecosystem engineers, and a taphonomic artefact. We perform the first critical test of the 'biotic replacement' hypothesis using combined palaeoecologica...

Palaeobiologist who pioneered mathematical modelling of mass extinctions.

A mid-Permian (Guadalupian epoch) extinction event at approximately 260 Ma has been mooted for two decades. This is based primarily on invertebrate biostratigraphy of Guadalupian-Lopingian marine carbonate platforms in southern China, which are temporally constrained by correlation to the associated Emeishan Large Igneous Province (LIP). Despite at...

The history of life is marked by a small number of major transitions, whether viewed from a genetic, ecological, or geological perspective. Specialists from various disciplines have focused on the packaging of information to generate new evolutionary individuals, on the expansion of ecological opportunity, or the abiotic drivers of environmental ch...

Developmental regulatory genes (largely transcription factors and signaling pathways) were once viewed as tightly connected to the origin of the morphological features with which they are associated in bilaterians. With the increased study of basal metazoans (sponges and cnidarians) as well as other eukaryotic clades, it is now clear that many of t...

Studies of the end-Permian mass extinction have suggested a variety of patterns from a single catastrophic event to multiple phases. But most of these analyses have been based on fossil distributions from single localities. Although single sections may simplify the interpretation of species diversity, they are susceptible to bias from stratigraphic...

Niche construction theory (NCT) explicitly recognizes environmental modication by organisms ("niche construction") and their legacy overtime ("ecological inheritance") to be evolutionary processes in their own right. Here we illustrate how niche construction theory provides usedl conceptual tools and theoretical insights for integrating ecosystem e...

The Ediacaran–Cambrian transition signals a drastic change in both diversity and ecosystem construction. The Ediacara biota (consisting of various metazoan stem lineages in addition to extinct eukaryotic clades) disappears, and is replaced by more familiar Cambrian and Paleozoic metazoan groups. Although metazoans are present in the Ediacaran, thei...

Therapsid and other tetrapod fossils from the South African Karoo Supergroup provide the most detailed and best studied terrestrial vertebrate record of the Middle and Late Permian. The resulting biostratigraphic scheme has global applicability. Establishing a temporal framework for these faunas has proven difficult: magnetostratigraphy has been ha...

The term macroevolution encompasses four logically and empirically distinct explanatory schemes for large-scale patterns in the fossil record: 1) the persistence of microevolutionary processes over long time periods, the default position adopted by Simpson and other participants in the modern synthesis; 2) alternative modes for generating variation...

Therapsid and other tetrapod fossils from the South African Karoo Supergroup provide the most detailed and best studied terrestrial vertebrate record of the Middle and Late Permian. The resulting biostratigraphic scheme has global applicability. Establishing a temporal framework for these faunas has proven diffi cult: mag-netostratigraphy has been...

Comparative developmental studies have revealed a rich array of details about the patterns and processes of morphological change in animals and increasingly in plants. But, applying these insights to the study of major episodes of evolutionary innovation requires understanding how these novel morphologies become established and sufficiently abundan...

Biologists and philosophers explore the implications of major transitions for our understanding of evolution, development, and individuality.

The fossil record typically exhibits very dynamic patterns of innovation, diversification and extinction. In contrast, molecular phylogenies suggest smoother patterns of evolutionary change. Several new studies reconcile this difference and reveal more about the mechanisms behind macroevolutionary change.

Diverse bilaterian clades emerged apparently within a few million years during the early Cambrian, and various environmental, developmental, and ecological causes have been proposed to explain this abrupt appearance. A compilation of the patterns of fossil and molecular diversification, comparative developmental data, and information on ecological...

The end-Permian mass extinction was the most severe biodiversity crisis in Earth history. To better constrain the timing, and ultimately the causes of this event, we collected a suite of geochronologic, isotopic, and biostratigraphic data on several well-preserved sedimentary sections in South China. High-precision U-Pb dating reveals that the exti...

I present a new compilation of the distribution of the temporal distribution of new morphologies of marine invertebrates associated with the Ediacaran-Cambrian (578-510 Ma) diversification of Metazoa. Combining this data with previous work on the hierarchical structure of gene regulatory networks, I argue that the distribution of morphologies may b...

a b s t r a c t Scientific theories seek to provide simple explanations for significant empirical regularities based on fundamental physical and mechanistic constraints. Biological theories have rarely reached a level of generality and predictive power comparable to physical theories. This discrepancy is explained through a combination of frozen ac...

Organismal modifications to their physical and chemical environment play a significant role in structuring many modern ecosystems, and experimental evidence suggests that such behavior can increase diversity. Despite the important role such activities play in connecting ecology and evolution, less is known of the macroevolutionary impact of such in...

Evolutionary biologists have identified a series of major evolutionary transitions (METs) between the origin of life and the spread of human language, including the origin of eukaryotes with endosymbiotic organelles, multicellularity with cellular differentiation and social societies. In the canonical view, each of these transitions is associated w...

Once a week, Eos brings to the Earth and space science community new views of Earth, and often this message contains reports of a warming Arctic, rising sea level, organisms and ecosystems in flux, changing atmospheric composition, and other processes that are driving us to an increasingly foreign Earth system. However, as geoscientists we know tha...

A theoretical ecospace is a multi-parameter system for classifying the ecological properties of organisms; because they are viewed in terms of their ecological and functional capabilities, morphologically and phylogenetically disparate organisms can be compared and contrasted. In the ecospace used here, marine animals are classified according to th...

Biotic recoveries following mass extinctions are characterized by a complex set of dynamics, including the rebuilding of whole ecologies from low-diversity assemblages of survivors and opportunistic species. Three broad classes of diversity dynamics during recovery have been suggested: an immediate linear response, a logistic recovery, and a simple...

The Neoproterozoic era was punctuated by the Sturtian (about 710 million years ago) and Marinoan (about 635million years ago) intervals of glaciation. In South Australia, the rocks left behind by the glaciations are separated by a succession of limestones and shales, which were deposited at tropical latitudes. Here we describe millimetre- to centim...

We propose the creation of a cross-cutting initiative designed to foster research into Earth's Archean biosphere.

The eumetazoan clade of modern animals includes cnidarians, acoels, deuterostomes, and protostomes. Stem group eumetazoans evolved in the late Neoproterozoic, possibly before the Marinoan glaciation, according to a variety of different kinds of evidence. Here, we combine this evidence, including paleontological observations, results from molecular...

The Domains of Microevolution and MacroevolutionChanging Meanings of MacroevolutionAn Expanding Hierarchy of SelectionOrigins of NoveltyMass ExtinctionsIs Evolution Uniformitarian?Conclusions Postscript: CounterpointReferences

Palaeontologists must model the causes of biodiversity rather than simply cataloguing fossils, says Douglas Erwin, as they curate the only record of ecosystems undamaged by humans.

Whole-genome sequences from the choanoflagellate Monosiga brevicollis, the placozoan Trichoplax adhaerens and the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis have confirmed results from comparative evolutionary developmental studies that much of the developmental toolkit once thought to be characteristic of bilaterians appeared much earlier in the evolution o...

The link between biodiversity and climate has been obvious to biologists since the work of von Humboldt in the early 1800s, but establishing the relationship of climate to ecological and evolutionary patterns is more difficult. On evolutionary timescales, climate can affect supply of energy by biotic and abiotic effects. Some of the best evidence f...

Comparative developmental evidence indicates that reorganizations in developmental gene regulatory networks (GRNs) underlie evolutionary changes in animal morphology, including body plans. We argue here that the nature of the evolutionary alterations that arise from regulatory changes depends on the hierarchical position of the change within a GRN....

The fossils described here were collected from the Lower Triassic (Olenekian) at two Majiashan sections in Chaohu City, Anhui Province, East China. Nine species belonging to five genera are introduced, including a new genus, Chaohuichthys, and some undetermined or unnamed fish specimens are discussed. The fish assemblage from Majiashan covers most...

Naraoiids, defined as lightly sclerotized arthropods with a dimidiate tergum of two sclerites separated by a single transverse articulation, have been found in the Cambrian and Silurian. During the Cambrian they had a wide distribution coinciding with trilobite realms. This pattern may be related to the breakup of a Neoproterozoic supercontinent, p...