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

化石吸引了我们的想象力，特别是那些保存完好的标本，装饰着世界各地博物馆的展厅。这些展出的非常完整的古代生命遗骸为我们提供了一些关于我们史前过去地球是什么样子的最佳线索。但在博物馆藏品的幕后，隐藏着巨大的宝贵科学信息宝库，这些信息保存在不太完整的化石中，往往永远不会出现在公众的视线中。尽管这些标本中的许多都不是很好看，但它们仍然有可能为科学家提供丰富的生物、生态和进化信息，帮助我们更好地了解地球上的生命历史。然而，古生物学家仍在试图弄清楚如何最好地将它们结合到更广泛的进化关系研究中(又名。系统发育分析)，或者是否将它们纳入其中。这项新颖的研究试图验证传统上持有的假设，即不完整的化石(代表已知的大部分已灭绝生物多样性)包含的进化信息不如它们更完整的同类化石那么可靠。Pi Woolley将对陆地和海洋化石记录进行首次采样，以揭示在保存动物生命树上不同分支的系统发育信息方面潜在的普遍模式：珊瑚、海胆、鸟类和有鳞动物(例如蜥蜴、蛇及其近亲)。这项调查将把世界各地自然历史博物馆收藏的基于标本的数据与一系列系统发育比较方法、指标和测试相结合，以确定特殊和非特殊化石保存对我们重建远古生物在深部时间进化关系的能力的影响。这是一项令人兴奋和必要的工作，因为这项研究产生的结果增加了美国国内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同时，包括更多地球上已灭绝的生物多样性。我们对过去的了解越完整，我们就越有能力准确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。这个项目支持皮.伍利的博士后研究，这是古生物学研究的一个关键但基本上被忽视的交叉点：埋藏学和系统发育学。它也是一个植根于STEM最无障碍的面向公众的界面的机构：自然历史博物馆。这个项目的目标是应用在Pi Woolley博士期间开发的系统发育比较方法来表征所观察到的具有生态意义的动物群体在空间和时间上的化石记录的质量。该项目将集中于描述珊瑚、棘形动物、有鳞动物和鸟类化石记录的偏倚和完整性，然后评估这些偏向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。该项目的原理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)地带学和系统发育学。因此，这项刻意全球性、跨学科、首创的研究直接涉及征集的主题：“与规模有关的问题”。这个项目研究了化石记录是如何通过博物馆藏品中存在的地质学、墓葬学和人为收藏偏见，到具有古生物数据库等集合收藏数据库的全球尺度的。通过评估有偏见和不完整的化石记录保留进化关系信息的能力，可以为将大量化石记录纳入对生物多样性随时间变化的更综合的古生物学分析奠定基础。在如此不同的具有生态意义的动物群体样本中表征化石记录偏差，也将使我们能够梳理出与分支、环境、地区或时间相关的记录偏差，以及那些可能更普遍地存在于化石保存总体上的记录偏差，从而为未来的分类研究和化石记录质量的评估提供关键的大规模背景。除了支持早期职业研究人员Pi Woolley，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研究生的指导和培训。最终，更好地理解偏见如何影响多个层面上的化石记录的质量，也将提供更好的背景数据，以预测和管理当前陆地和海洋的生物危机。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.