Postdoctoral Fellowship: EAR-PF: Novel approaches to evaluating the quality of the global fossil record: the frontier between taphonomy and phylogenetics

博士后奖学金：EAR-PF：评估全球化石记录质量的新方法：埋藏学和系统发育学之间的前沿

• 批准号: 2305564
• 负责人: Charles Woolley
• 金额: $ 18万
• 依托单位: Woolley, Charles Henrik
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Fellowship Award
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-08-01 至 2025-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2305564&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Postdoctoral; Fellowship; EAR; PF; Novel

Fossils captivate our imaginations, especially the spectacularly preserved specimens that decorate the exhibit halls of museums around the world. These remarkably complete remains of ancient life on display offer us some of the best clues regarding what earth was like in our prehistoric past. But behind the scenes in museum collections lie vast treasure troves of valuable scientific information preserved in the less complete fossils that often never see the public eye. Although many of these specimens aren’t much to look at, they nevertheless have the potential to provide scientists with a wealth of biological, ecological, and evolutionary information to help us better understand the history of life on Earth. However, paleontologists are still trying to figure out how to best incorporate them into broader studies of evolutionary relationships (a.k.a. phylogenetic analyses), or whether to incorporate them at all. This novel study seeks to test the traditionally-held hypothesis that incomplete fossils (which represent the majority of known extinct biodiversity) contain less reliable evolutionary information than their more complete counterparts. PI Woolley will carry out a first-of-its-kind sampling of the terrestrial and marine fossil records to uncover potential universal patterns in the preservation of phylogenetic information of disparate branches on the animal Tree of Life: corals, sea urchins, birds, and squamates (e.g., lizards, snakes, and their relatives). The survey will integrate specimen-based data held in natural history museum collections around the world with a series of phylogenetic comparative methods, metrics, and tests to determine the effects of exceptional and not-so-exceptional fossil preservation on our ability to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of ancient organisms in Deep Time. This is exciting and necessary work, because results generated from this research increase the scientific value of incomplete specimens housed in museum collections within the United States and abroad, and allow us to include more of Earth’s extinct biodiversity as we continue to piece together the past. And the more complete our picture of the past is, the more capable we will be in accurately predicting and managing changes in today’s ecosystems as our planet continues to warm. This project supports PI Woolley’s postdoctoral research at a critical but largely ignored intersection of paleobiological inquiry: taphonomy and phylogenetics. It is also a project that is rooted in institutions situated at STEM’s most accessible public-facing interface: natural history museums. The goal of this project is to apply phylogenetic comparative methods developed during PI Woolley’s PhD to characterize the quality of the observed fossil record of ecologically significant animal groups through space and time. The project will center on characterizing the biases and completeness of the fossil records of corals, echinoids, squamates, and birds, and then assessing the phylogenetic information content of these biased records, and thus our ability to infer evolutionary relationships. The principles of this project unite disciplines within Paleobiology that rarely overlap: 1) marine and terrestrial sedimentological realms; 2) invertebrate and vertebrate paleontology; 3) taphonomy and phylogenetics. As a result, this deliberately global, cross-disciplinary, first-of-its-kind research directly addresses the theme of the solicitation: “issues relating to scale”. This project examines how the fossil record is filtered through geologic, taphonomic, and anthropogenic collecting biases that are present at local scales within museum collections, to global scales with aggregated collections databases like the Paleobiology Database. By assessing the capacity of a biased and fragmentary fossil record to retain information about evolutionary relationships, a groundwork can be established for incorporating the vast bulk of the fossil record into more synthetic paleobiological analyses of biodiversity patterns through time. Characterizing fossil record biases across such a disparate sampling of ecologically significant animal groups will also allow us to tease apart record biases that are clade-, environment-, region-, or time-dependent, versus those that may be more ubiquitous to fossil preservation in general, thus providing a critical large-scale context for future taphonomic studies and assessments of fossil record quality. In addition to supporting the early career researcher PI Woolley, this project will be incorporated into public-facing museum programming, college course modules, and undergraduate and post-baccalaureate mentoring and training. Ultimately, a greater understanding of how bias affects the quality of fossil records at multiple planes will also provide improved contextual data to predict and manage the current biotic crisis on land and in the ocean.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

化石吸引着我们的想象力，特别是那些装饰着世界各地博物馆霍尔斯的保存完好的化石标本。这些展示的非常完整的古代生命遗迹为我们提供了一些关于史前地球是什么样的最好的线索。但在博物馆藏品的幕后，隐藏着大量有价值的科学信息，这些信息保存在不太完整的化石中，通常从未出现在公众面前。虽然这些标本中的许多并不起眼，但它们有可能为科学家提供丰富的生物学、生态学和进化信息，帮助我们更好地了解地球上生命的历史。然而，古生物学家仍在试图找出如何最好地将它们纳入更广泛的进化关系研究（也就是说，系统发育分析），或者是否将它们合并。这项新的研究旨在测试传统的假设，即不完整的化石（代表大多数已知灭绝的生物多样性）包含的进化信息比更完整的化石更不可靠。PI Woolley将对陆地和海洋化石记录进行首次采样，以揭示动物生命之树上不同分支的系统发育信息保存的潜在普遍模式：珊瑚，海胆，鸟类和有鳞目动物（例如，蜥蜴、蛇和它们的亲戚）。这项调查将整合世界各地自然历史博物馆收藏的基于达尔文的数据，以及一系列系统发育比较方法、指标和测试，以确定特殊和不那么特殊的化石保存对我们重建远古生物进化关系的能力的影响。这是一项令人兴奋和必要的工作，因为这项研究的结果增加了美国和国外博物馆收藏的不完整标本的科学价值，并使我们能够在继续拼凑过去的过程中包括更多地球灭绝的生物多样性。我们对过去的描述越完整，我们就越有能力准确地预测和管理当今生态系统的变化，因为我们的星球继续变暖。该项目支持PI Woolley在一个关键但在很大程度上被忽视的古生物学研究交叉点的博士后研究：埋藏学和生物遗传学。这也是一个植根于位于STEM最容易接近的面向公众的界面的机构的项目：自然历史博物馆。该项目的目标是应用PI Woolley博士期间开发的系统发育比较方法，通过空间和时间来表征观察到的具有生态意义的动物群化石记录的质量。该项目将集中在表征珊瑚，海胆，有鳞目和鸟类化石记录的偏差和完整性，然后评估这些偏差记录的系统发育信息内容，从而评估我们推断进化关系的能力。该项目的原则统一了古生物学中很少重叠的学科：1）海洋和陆地沉积学领域; 2）无脊椎动物和脊椎动物古生物学; 3）埋藏学和生物遗传学。因此，这一全球性的、跨学科的、首创的研究直接解决了征集的主题：“与规模有关的问题”。该项目研究了化石记录如何通过地质，埋藏学和人为收集偏见进行过滤，这些偏见存在于博物馆收藏品中的局部规模，到全球规模的集合数据库，如古生物学数据库。通过评估有偏见的和零碎的化石记录保留进化关系信息的能力，可以建立一个基础，将大量的化石记录纳入更综合的古生物学分析的生物多样性模式，随着时间的推移。在这样一个不同的采样生态意义的动物群体的化石记录的偏见的特点，也将使我们能够梳理除了记录的偏见是分支，环境，区域或时间依赖性，与那些可能是更普遍存在的化石保存一般，从而提供了一个关键的大规模的背景下，为未来的埋藏研究和评估化石记录的质量。除了支持早期职业研究员PI Woolley之外，该项目还将纳入面向公众的博物馆规划、大学课程模块以及本科生和学士后辅导和培训中。最终，更深入地了解偏见如何影响多个层面的化石记录质量，也将为预测和管理当前陆地和海洋生物危机提供更好的背景数据。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。