Jackson Jeremy B C, Erwin Douglas H
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California-San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0244, USA.
Trends Ecol Evol. 2006 Jun;21(6):322-8. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2006.03.017. Epub 2006 Apr 19.
The increased application of abundance data embedded within a more detailed and precise environmental context is enabling paleontologists to explore more rigorously the dynamics and underlying processes of ecological and evolutionary change in deep time. Several recent findings are of special theoretical interest. Community membership is commonly more stable and persistent than expected by chance, even in the face of the extreme environmental changes of the Ice Ages, and major evolutionary novelties commonly lie dormant for tens of millions of years before the ecological explosions of the clades that possess them. As we discuss here, questions such as these cannot be adequately addressed without the use of the fossil record.
在更详细、精确的环境背景下嵌入的丰度数据的应用不断增加，这使得古生物学家能够更严格地探索地质历史时期生态和进化变化的动态及潜在过程。最近的一些发现具有特殊的理论意义。群落成员通常比随机预期的更加稳定和持久，即使面对冰河时代的极端环境变化也是如此，而且主要的进化新特征在拥有它们的类群发生生态爆发之前，通常会潜伏数千万年。正如我们在此所讨论的，不利用化石记录就无法充分解决诸如此类的问题。
