Quality of the fossil record through time
Quality of the fossil record through time
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DOI：
10.1038/35000558
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发表时间：
2000-02-03
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Hitchin, R
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Benton, MJ;Wills, MA;Hitchin, R
化石记录是否真实地展现了生命的历史(1-3)，还是应该谨慎看待(4-6)？劳普（5）认为，生命多样化图（2）是偏见的例证：岩石越古老，我们知道的就越少。观察结果(7)部分解决了这场争论，即不同的数据集随着时间的推移呈现出相似的多样性上升模式。在这里，我们展示了新的评估方法，其中将岩石中化石的顺序（地层学）与进化树固有的顺序（系统发育学）进行比较，提供了更有说服力的分析工具：地层学和系统发育学提供了关于历史的独立数据。对 1,000 个已发表的系统发育样本的地层学和系统发育之间的一致性评估显示，没有证据表明质量随着时间的推移而降低。平均而言，古代岩石明显比现代岩石保存的信息少。然而，如果按照阶段的地层水平和科的分类水平来衡量，过去5.4亿年的化石记录为过去的生命提供了一致的良好记录。
Does the fossil record present a true picture of the history of life(1-3), or should it be viewed with caution(4-6)? Raup(5) argued that plots of the diversification of life(2) were an illustration of bias: the older the rocks, the less we know. The debate was partially resolved by the observation(7) that different data sets gave similar patterns of rising diversity through time. Here we show that new assessment methods, in which the order of fossils in the rocks (stratigraphy) is compared with the order inherent in evolutionary trees (phylogeny), provide a more convincing analytical tool: stratigraphy and phylogeny offer independent data on history. Assessments of congruence between stratigraphy and phylogeny for a sample of 1,000 published phylogenies show no evidence of diminution of quality backwards in time. Ancient rocks clearly preserve less information, on average, than more recent rocks. However, if scaled to the stratigraphic level of the stage and the taxonomic level of the family, the past 540 million years of the fossil record provide uniformly good documentation of the life of the past.