Erin E Saupe

Yale University | YU · Department of Geology & Geophysics

Aim To determine the degree to which assemblages of planktonic foraminifera track thermal conditions. Location The world's oceans. Time Period The last 700,000 years of glacial–interglacial cycles. Major Taxa Studied Planktonic foraminifera. Methods We investigate assemblage dynamics in planktonic foraminifera in response to temperature changes...

Climate and ecosystems exhibit dynamic behavior across various timescales, but existing studies often focus on singular timescales when examining ecosystem responses to climate. Here we develop a conceptual and analytical framework using spectral analysis that examines a continuum of timescales, from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years. By c...

The brain is thought to be among the first human organs to decompose after death. The discovery of brains preserved in the archaeological record is therefore regarded as unusual. Although mechanisms such as dehydration, freezing, saponification, and tanning are known to allow for the preservation of the brain on short time scales in association wit...

Aim To determine the degree to which assemblages of planktonic foraminifera track thermal conditions. Location The world’s oceans. Time period The last 700,000 years of glacial-interglacial cycles. Major taxa studied Planktonic foraminifera. Methods We investigate assemblage dynamics in planktonic foraminifera in response to temperature changes...

Anthropogenic climate change is increasing rapidly and already impacting biodiversity. Despite its importance in future projections, understanding of the underlying mechanisms by which climate mediates extinction remains limited. We present an integrated approach examining the role of intrinsic traits versus extrinsic climate change in mediating ex...

Lengthy debate has surrounded the theoretical and empirical science of whether climatic niche evolution is related to increased or decreased rates of biological diversification. Because species can persist for thousands to millions of years, these questions cross broad scales of time and space. Thus, short-term experiments may not provide comprehen...

The fossil record is spatiotemporally heterogeneous: taxon occurrence data have patchy spatial distributions, and this patchiness varies through time. Large-scale quantitative paleobiology studies that fail to account for heterogeneous sampling coverage will generate uninformative inferences at best and confidently draw wrong conclusions at worst....

Measurement theory, a branch of applied mathematics, offers guiding principles for extracting meaning from empirical observations and is applicable to any science involving measurements. Measurement theory is highly relevant in paleobiology because statistical approaches assuming ratio-scaled variables are commonly used on data belonging to nominal...

Motivation: We have little understanding of how communities respond to vary- ing magnitudes and rates of environmental perturbations across temporal scales. BioDeepTime harmonizes assemblage time series of presence and abundance data to help facilitate investigations of community dynamics across timescales and the re- sponse of communities to natur...

This PDF contains the extensive Supplementary Data of the paper "Amber and the Cretaceous Resinous Event" at the end of it

THE PAPER IS IN OPEN ACCESS IN THE URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2023.104486 Amber is fossilized resin that preserves biological remains in exceptional detail, study of which has revolutionized understanding of past terrestrial organisms and habitats from the Early Cretaceous to the present day. Cretaceous amber outcrops are more abund...

Aims Climate change is expected to have profound effects on species' distributions into the future. Freshwater fishes, an important component of freshwater ecosystems, are no exception. Here, we project shifts in suitable conditions for Australian freshwater fishes under different climate change scenarios to identify species that may experience sig...

The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG) is a prevalent feature of modern ecosystems across diverse clades1–4. Recognized for well over a century, the causal mechanisms for LDGs remain disputed, in part because numerous putative drivers simultaneously covary with latitude1,3,5. The past provides the opportunity to disentangle LDG mechanisms because...

Understanding spatial variation in origination and extinction can help to unravel the mechanisms underlying macroevolutionary patterns. Although methods have been developed for estimating global origination and extinction rates from the fossil record, no framework exists for applying these methods to restricted spatial regions. Here, we test the ef...

Hotspots of tropical marine biodiversity are areas that harbour disproportionately large numbers of species compared to surrounding regions. The richness and location of these hotspots have changed throughout the Cenozoic. Here, we review the global dynamics of Cenozoic tropical marine biodiversity hotspots, including the four major hotspots of the...

Geographic ranges are a fundamental unit of biogeography and macroecology. Increasingly, paleontologists and ecologists alike are reconstructing geographic ranges of species from fossils, in order to understand the long-term processes governing biogeographic and macroevolutionary patterns. As these reconstructions have become increasingly common, u...

The main text in the “Mixed-Effects Models” section inaccurately summarized two features of supplemental Table S5. The table is correct and can be replicated from the archived data and code associated with the paper (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3491853). 1. The text stated, “The three highest-ranking linear mixed-effects models for minimum span...

Animals originated in the oceans and evolved there for hundreds of millions of years before adapting to terrestrial environments. Today, oceans cover more than two-thirds of Earth and generate as much primary production as land. The path from the first macrobiota to modern marine biodiversity involved parallel increases in terrestrial nutrient inpu...

Anthropogenic activity is changing Earth's climate and ecosystems in ways that are potentially dangerous and disruptive to humans. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise, ensuring that these changes will be felt for centuries beyond 2100, the current benchmark for projection. Estimating the effects of past, current, and po...

Planktonic foraminifera are a major constituent of ocean floor sediments, and thus have one of the most complete fossil records of any organism. Expeditions to sample these sediments have produced large amounts of spatiotemporal occurrence records throughout the Cenozoic, but no single source exists to house these data. We have therefore created a...

Significance We examined the degree to which temperature tolerances changed on 8,000-y timescales across 700,000 y of glacial–interglacial climate change. We coupled a new fossil occurrence database of planktonic foraminifera, an abundant type of zooplankton, with Atmosphere–Ocean Global Circulation Model reconstructions of past climates. Our suite...

The role of minerals in Burgess Shale–type fossilization is controversial, particularly that of the clay mineral kaolinite. Kaolinite may have formed on carcasses or attached to them as they decayed, stabilizing organic matter. Alternatively, kaolinite may have formed during metamorphism, playing no role in the preservation of soft tissues. Evaluat...

Geographic range size and abundance are important determinants of extinction risk in fossil and extant taxa. However, the relationship between these variables and extinction risk has not been tested extensively during evolutionarily “quiescent” times of low extinction and speciation in the fossil record. Here we examine the influence of geographic...

Anthropogenic activity is changing Earth’s climate and ecosystems in ways that are potentially dangerous and disruptive to humans . Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise, ensuring these changes will be felt for centuries beyond 2100, the current benchmark for prediction emissions to only 2100 is therefore shortsighted. Cr...

Analyses of morphological disparity have been used to characterize and investigate the evolution of variation in the anatomy, function and ecology of organisms since the 1980s. While a diversity of methods have been employed, it is unclear whether they provide equivalent insights. Here, we review the most commonly used approaches for characterizing...

Reconstructing ecological niche evolution can provide insight into the biogeography and diversification of evolving lineages. However, comparative phylogenetic methods may infer the history of ecological niche evolution inaccurately because (a) species' niches are often poorly characterized; and (b) phylogenetic comparative methods rely on niche su...

The decline in species richness from the equator to the poles is referred to as the latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG). Higher equatorial diversity has been recognised for over 200 years, but the consistency of this pattern in deep time remains uncertain. Examination of spatial biodiversity patterns in the past across different global climate reg...

Reconstructing geographic range sizes from fossil data is a crucial tool in paleoecology, shedding light on macroecological and macroevolutionary processes. Studies examining links between range size and extinction risk may also offer a predictive tool for identifying species most vulnerable in the ‘6th mass extinction’. However, the extent to whic...

A striking feature of the marine fossil record is the variable intensity of extinction during superficially similar climate transitions. Here we combine climate models and species trait simulations to explore the degree to which differing palaeogeographic boundary conditions and differing magnitudes of cooling and glaciation can explain the relativ...

Abiotic niche lability reduces extinction risk by allowing species to adapt to changing environmental conditions. In contrast, species with static niches must keep pace with the velocity of climate change as they track suitable habitat. The rate and frequency of niche lability have been studied on human timescales (months to decades) and geological...

Fundamental ecological and evolutionary theories, such as community saturation and diversity-dependent diversification, assume that biotic competition restricts resource use, and thus limits realized niche breadth and geographic range size [1-3]. This principle is called competitive exclusion. The corollary (ecological release) posits that, after c...

Palaeontologists often ask identical questions to those asked by ecologists. Despite this, ecology is considered a core discipline of conservation biology, while palaeontologists are rarely consulted in the protection of species, habitats and ecosystems. The recent emergence of conservation palaeobiology presents a big step towards better integrati...

The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG), where the number of species increases from the poles to the Equator, ranks among the broadest and most notable biodiversity patterns on Earth. The pattern of species-rich tropics relative to species-poor temperate areas has been recognized for well over a century, but the generative mechanisms are still deb...

Beginning in 2012, the JRS Biodiversity Foundation funded the University of Kansas to carry out a series of courses covering the breadth of the field of biodiversity informatics in cities across Africa. The Biodiversity Informatics Training Curriculum (BITC) was created from these events that used in-person courses taught by world experts in biodiv...

Many higher level avian clades are restricted to Earth’s lower latitudes, leading to historical biogeographic reconstructions favoring a Gondwanan origin of crown birds and numerous deep subclades. However, several such “tropical-restricted” clades (TRCs) are represented by stem-lineage fossils well outside the ranges of their closest living relati...

In modern environmental and climate science it is necessary to assimilate observational datasets collected over decades with outputs from numerical models, to enable a full understanding of natural systems and their sensitivities. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, numerical modelling became central to many areas of science from the B...

Aim Tropical species are thought to experience and be adapted to narrow ranges of abiotic conditions. This idea has been invoked to explain a broad array of biological phenomena, including the latitudinal diversity gradient and differential rates of speciation and extinction. However, debate continues regarding the broad‐scale applicability of this...

Basal metabolic rate (BMR) is posited to be a fundamental control on the structure and dynamics of ecological networks, influencing organism resource use and rates of senescence. Differences in the maintenance energy requirements of individual species therefore potentially predict extinction likelihood. If validated, this would comprise an importan...

Basal metabolic rate is posited to be a fundamental control on the structure and dynamics of ecological networks, influencing organism resource use and rates of senescence. Differences in the maintenance energy requirements of individual species therefore potentially predict extinction likelihood. If validated, this would comprise an important link...

Oxygenic photosynthesis fundamentally transformed all major biogeochemical cycles and increased the size and complexity of Earth's biosphere. However, there is still debate about when this metabolism evolved. As oxygenic photosynthesis is the only significant source of O2 at Earth’s surface, O2-sensitive trace element enrichments and isotopic signa...

Ecologists and paleontologists alike are increasingly using the fossil record as a spatial data set, in particular to study the dynamics and distribution of geographic range sizes among fossil taxa. However, no attempts have been made to establish how accurately range sizes and range-size dynamics can be preserved. Two fundamental questions are: Ca...

Evolutionary dynamics of abiotic ecological niches across phylogenetic history can shed light on large-scale biogeographic patterns, macroevolutionary rate shifts, and the relative ability of lineages to respond to global change. An unresolved question is how best to represent and reconstruct evolution of these complex traits at coarse spatial scal...

New opportunities to digitize museum collections have greatly facilitated research in macroevolution. Here we focus on some of the research applications of digitization efforts using collections from the University of Kansas and partners in two National Science Foundation Thematic Collections Network (TCN) grants, the Paleoniches and the Cretaceous...

Exceptionally preserved organic fossils are commonly associated with clay-rich horizons or directly with clay minerals. It has been posited that interactions between clay minerals and organic tissues inhibit enzymatic reactions or protect carcasses in such a way that decay is impeded. However, interactions between clay minerals and the biological a...

Blonder et al. (2014, Global Ecology and Biogeography, 23, 595–609) introduced a new multivariate kernel density estimation (KDE) method to infer Hutchinsonian hypervolumes in the modelling of ecological niches. The authors argued that their KDE method matches or outperforms several methods for estimating hypervolume geometries and for conducting s...

We describe a spatially explicit simulation experiment de- signed to assess relative impacts of macroecological traits on patterns of biological diversification under changing environmental conditions. Using a simulation framework, we assessed impacts of species’ niche breadth (i.e., the range of their abiotic tolerances) and dispersal ability on r...

Problematic fossils, extinct taxa of enigmatic morphology that cannot be assigned to a known major group, were once a major issue in palaeontology. A long-favoured solution to the 'problem of the problematica', particularly the 'weird wonders' of the Cambrian Burgess Shale, was to consider them representatives of extinct phyla. A combination of new...

The concept of the niche is fundamental to ecology and palaeoecology, and an extensive body of scientific literature exists on the subject Here we discuss how recent palaeontological studies, particularly those focusing on species' niche dynamics through time, continue to integrate palaeoecology with macroevolutionary theory.

Body size is often considered the most important quantitative trait of an individual organism. This is because it can be directly correlated with multiple life-history traits, both physiological (e.g., metabolic rate) and fitness-related (e.g., generation time, fecundity). With body size encapsulating such a significant quantity of biological infor...

Ecologists and paleontologists alike are increasingly using the fossil record as a spatial dataset, in particular to study the dynamics and distribution of geographic range sizes among fossil taxa. However, no attempts have yet been made to establish how accurately range sizes and range-size dynamics can be preserved in fossil locality data, and wh...

AimDetermining which species are more prone to extinction is vital for conserving Earth's biodiversity and for providing insight into macroevolutionary processes. This paper utilizes the Pliocene to Recent fossil record of mollusks to identify determinants of species' extinction over the past three million years of Earth history.LocationWestern Atl...

ABSTRACT: Abundance and other aspects of population ecology have long been known to contribute to shaping the geography of speciesí distributions. In particular, abundance patterns have recently been shown to negatively correlate with environmental distance from conditions in the center of a speciesí abiotic niche, rather than vary with distance fr...

The vigor and relevance of contemporary paleontological research were demonstrated at the 4th International Palaeontological Congress (IPC4), held in e city of Mendoza, Argentina from September 28 to October 3, 2014. The research presented at IPC4 was highly diverse in its topical, organismal, geographical, and temporal coverage. The workshops, sym...

In order to predict the fate of biodiversity in a rapidly changing world, we must first understand how species adapt to new environmental conditions. The long-term evolutionary dynamics of species' physiological tolerances to differing climatic regimes remain obscure. Here, we unite palaeontological and neontological data to analyse whether species...

Background Understanding the evolutionary history of morphologically cryptic species complexes is difficult, and made even more challenging when geographic distributions have been modified by human-mediated dispersal. This situation is common in the Mediterranean Basin where, aside from the environmental heterogeneity of the region, protracted huma...

Many modern paleobiological analyses are conducted at the generic level, a practice predicated on the validity of genera as meaningful proxies for species. Uncritical application of genera in such analyses, however, has led—perhaps inadvertently—to the unjustified reification of genera in an evolutionary context. While the utility of genera as prox...

Aim Numerous studies have examined potential responses of terrestrial biotas to future climate change, but fewer have considered marine realms. We forecast how marine molluscan faunas might respond to environmental change over the remainder of this century. We test the hypotheses that suitable areas will shift northwards for studied species, and th...