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

化石吸引着我们的想象力，尤其是那些保存完好的标本，装饰着世界各地博物馆的展厅。展出的这些非常完整的古代生命遗骸为我们提供了一些关于史前地球是什么样子的最好线索。但在博物馆藏品的背后，隐藏着大量珍贵的科学信息，这些信息被保存在不太完整的化石中，而这些化石往往从未进入公众的视野。尽管这些标本中有许多没什么可看的，但它们仍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纳入更广泛的进化关系研究（又名系统发育分析），或者是否要将它们纳入研究。这项新颖的研究试图测试传统的假设，即不完整的化石（代表了已知灭绝的生物多样性的大部分）包含的可靠进化信息比更完整的化石少。PI Woolley将首次对陆地和海洋化石记录进行采样，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、鸟类和有鳞动物（如蜥蜴、蛇及其亲属）。这项调查将把世界各地自然历史博物馆收藏的标本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，并使我们在继续拼凑过去的同时，能够包括更多地球上灭绝的生物多样性。我们对过去的了解越全面，我们就越有能力准确地预测和管理随着地球持续变暖，今天生态系统的变化。这个项目支持PI Woolley的博士后研究，在古生物学研究的一个关键但在很大程度上被忽视的交叉点：埋藏学和系统发育学。这也是一个植根于STEM最容易进入的面向公众的接口机构：自然历史博物馆的项目。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类群的化石记录的质量。该项目将重点描述珊瑚、棘类、鳞片类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，从而推断进化关系的能力。这个项目的原则结合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)无脊椎和脊椎动物古生物学；3)埋藏学和系统发育学。因此，这项全球性的、跨学科的、首创的研究直接解决了本次征集的主题：“与规模有关的问题”。该项目研究了化石记录是如何通过地质、地语学和人为收集的偏见（这些偏见存在于博物馆收藏的地方尺度上）过滤到古生物学数据库（Paleobiology Database）等全球尺度的汇总收集数据库的。通过评估有偏差的和零碎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更综合的古生物学分析中奠定基础。在如此不同的具有生态意义的动物群体样本中描述化石记录偏差，也将使我们能够梳理出与进化、环境、区域或时间相关的记录偏差，而不是那些可能普遍存在于化石保存中的记录偏差，从而为未来的地形学研究和化石记录质量评估提供关键的大规模背景。除了支持早期职业研究者PI Woolley之外，该项目还将被纳入面向公众的博物馆规划、大学课程模块以及本科和本科后的指导和培训中。最终，更深入地了解偏见如何影响多层面化石记录的质量，也将为预测和管理当前陆地和海洋上的生物危机提供更好的背景数据。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并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，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.