The non-uniformity of fossil preservation
@article{Holland2016TheNO, title={The non-uniformity of fossil preservation}, author={Steven M. Holland}, journal={Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences}, year={2016}, volume={371} }
The fossil record provides the primary source of data for calibrating the origin of clades. Although minimum ages of clades are given by the oldest preserved fossil, these underestimate the true age, which must be bracketed by probabilistic methods based on multiple fossil occurrences. Although most of these methods assume uniform preservation rates, this assumption is unsupported over geological timescales. On geologically long timescales (more than 10 Myr), the origin and cessation of…
69 Citations
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