Planktonic foraminifera are extremely well suited to studying evolutionary change in the fossil record due to their abundant deposits and global distribution. Species are typically conservative in their shell morphology, with the same geometric shapes appearing repeatedly through iterative evolution, but the mechanisms behind the architectural limits on foraminiferal shell shape are still not well understood. To determine how these developmental constraints arise, we study morphological change leading up to the origination of the unusually ornate species Globigerinoidesella fistulosa. We measured the size and circularity of more than 900 specimens of G. fistulosa, its ancestor the Trilobatus sacculifer plexus, and intermediate forms from a site in the western equatorial Pacific. Our results show that the origination of G. fistulosa from the T. sacculifer plexus involved a combination of two heterochronic expressions: earlier onset of protuberances (pre-displacement) and a steeper allometric slope (acceleration) as compared with its ancestor. Our work provides a case study of the complex morphological and developmental changes required to produce unusual shell shapes and highlights the importance of developmental deviations in evolutionary origination.

The Paleozoic evolution of a complex terrestrial biota has been among the most important events in Earth history. Here, we synthesize paleontological and neontological information across the different threads of the biota—including microbial life, fungi, animals, and plants—addressing discrepancies between the fossil record and time-calibrated molecular phylogenies. Four fundamental patterns are emphasized: (1) Most terrestrial animal lineages consist of diminutive inhabitants of soil and litter, with the soil fauna exhibiting remarkable continuity between the Paleozoic and present. (2) Faunal evolution tracks the ecological opportunities afforded by the evolution of the land flora. Flora and fauna alike were initially confined to the thin interface between soil and air, but animals explored both flight and burrowing as vascular plant size increased to encompass tree stature and deep rooting. (3) Skewed nutrient ratios of land plants present a fundamental challenge for animals that are accommodated through contrasting size-based dietary strategies. Detritivory and cell-by-cell herbivory are the diets most readily available for primary consumers but impose limits on the largest possible body sizes; only with subsequent evolution of herbivory in insects and then vertebrates could the dramatic increases in size in the Permian and Mesozoic have been achieved. (4) A second pulse of animal terrestrializations is apparent in the Cretaceous and Cenozoic that might be attributed to increased terrestrial productivity associated with angiosperm evolution. However, environmental changes to nutrient availability earlier in the Mesozoic prevent an unambiguous causal attribution, and the pulse may just be an artifact of our modern vantage point.

A central goal in ecology is investigating the impact of major perturbations, such as invasion, on the structure of biological communities. One promising line of inquiry is using co-occurrence analyses to examine how species’ traits mediate coexistence and how major ecological, climatic, and environmental disturbances can affect this relationship and underlying mechanisms. However, present communities are heavily influenced by anthropogenic behaviors and may exhibit greater or lesser resistance to invasion than communities that existed before human arrival. Therefore, to disentangle the impact of individual disturbances on mammalian communities, it is important to examine community dynamics before humans. Here, we use the North American fossil record to evaluate the co-occurrence structure of mammals across the Great American Biotic Interchange. We compiled 126 paleocommunities from the late Pliocene (4–2.5 Ma) and early Pleistocene (2.5–1 Ma). Genus-level co-occurrence was calculated to identify significantly aggregated (co-occur more than expected) and segregated (co-occur less than expected) genus pairs. A functional diversity analysis was used to calculate functional distance between genus pairs to evaluate the relationship between pair association strength and functional role. We found that the strength distribution of aggregating and segregating genus pairs does not significantly change from the late Pliocene to the early Pleistocene, even with different mammals forming the pairs, including immigrant mammals from South America. However, we did find that significant pairs, both aggregations and segregations, became more similar in their functional roles following the Plio-Pleistocene transition. Due to different mammals and ecological roles forming significant associations and the stability of co-occurrence structure across this interval, our study suggests that mammals have fundamental ways of assembling that may have been altered by humans in the present.

Over the last 50 years, paleobiology has made great strides in illuminating organisms and ecosystems in deep time through study of the often-curious nature of the fossil record itself. Among fossil deposits, none are as enigmatic or as important to our understanding of the history of life as Konservat-Lagerstätten, deposits that preserve soft-bodied fossils and thereby retain disproportionately large amounts of paleobiological information. While Konservat-Lagerstätten are often viewed as curiosities of the fossil record, decades of study have led to a better understanding of the environments and circumstances of exceptional fossilization.Whereas most types of exceptional preservation require very specific sets of conditions, which are rare but can occur at any time, Seilacher noted the problem of “anactualistic” modes of exceptional preservation, defined as modes of fossilization that are restricted in time and that no longer occur. Here, we focus on anactualistic preservation and the widely recognized overrepresentation of Konservat-Lagerstätten in the Ediacaran and early Paleozoic. While exceptional fossil deposits of Ediacaran, Cambrian, and Early Ordovician age encompass a number of modes of fossilization, the signal of exceptional preservation is driven by only two modes, Ediacara-type and Burgess Shale–type preservation. Both are “extinct” modes of fossilization that are no longer present in marine environments. We consider the controls that promoted widespread anactualistic preservation in the Ediacaran and early Paleozoic and their implications for the environmental conditions in which complex life first proliferated in the oceans.

Analysis of length-frequency data using the ELEFAN (Electronic Length-Frequency Analysis) approach and software is widely used to quantify the growth, mortality, longevity, and related parameters of Recent marine animals. Here we analyze a sample (n = 211) of the Ediacaran metazoan Parvancorina minchami Glaessner, 1958, from the Vendian siliciclastic marine deposits of the southeastern White Sea region, Russia. The results fit a von Bertalanffy equation with the parameters L∞ = 2 cm, K = yr−1 (with t0 not estimated) and an instantaneous rate of mortality (M) of 1.44 yr−1, implying M/K ≈ 2, as commonly occurs in Recent small invertebrates. These parameter values also imply a longevity for P. minchami of about 4 yr. The concepts and approach used here, previously applied to an Ordovician trilobite and a Cambrian radiodont, suggest that inferences on growth, mortality, longevity, and related parameters can be obtained from suitable size-frequency samples of long-extinct metazoans, opening new vistas on their growth dynamics and functional roles in ancient ecosystems.

The common-cause hypothesis says that factors regulating the sedimentary record also exert macroevolutionary controls on speciation, extinction, and biodiversity. I show through computational modeling that common cause factors can, in principle, also control microevolutionary processes of trait evolution. Using Bermuda and its endemic land snail Poecilozonites, I show that the glacial–interglacial sea-level cycles that toggle local sedimentation between slow pedogenesis and rapid eolian accumulation could also toggle evolution rates between long slow phases associated with large geographic ranges and short rapid phases associated with small, fragmented ranges and “genetic surfing” events. Patterns produced by this spatially driven process are similar to the punctuated equilibria patterns that Gould inferred from the fossil record of Bermuda, but without speciation or true stasis. Rather, the dynamics of this modeled system mimic a two-rate Brownian motion process (even though the rate parameter is technically constant) in which the contrast in rate and duration of the phases makes the slower one appear static. The link between sedimentation and microevolution in this model is based on a sediment-starved island system, but the principles may apply to any system where physical processes jointly control the areal extents of sedimentary regimes and species’ distributions.

Organismal morphology was at the core of study of biodiversity for millennia before the formalization of the concept of evolution. In the early to mid-twentieth century, a strong theoretical framework was developed for understanding both pattern and process of morphological evolution, and the 50 years since the founding of this journal capture a transformational period in the quantification of morphology and in analytical tools for estimating how morphological diversity changes through time. We are now at another inflection point in the study of morphological evolution, with the availability of vast amounts of high-resolution data sampling extant and extinct diversity allowing “omics”-scale analysis. Artificial intelligence is accelerating the pace of phenomic data acquisition even further. This new reality, in which the ability to obtain data is quickly outpacing the ability to analyze it with robust, realistic evolutionary models, brings a new set of challenges. Phylogenetic comparative methods have provided new insights into the processes generating morphological diversity, but the reliance on molecular data and resultant exclusion of fossil data from most large phylogenetic trees has well-established negative impacts on evolutionary analyses, as we demonstrate with examples of standard single-rate evolutionary models, mode- and rate-shift models, and a recently described Ornstein-Uhlenbeck climate model. Further development of methods for phylogenetic comparative analysis of high-dimensional data is needed, but existing tools can refine our understanding and expectations of morphological evolution and the generation of morphological diversity under different scenarios, as we demonstrate with analyses of placental skull evolution through the Cenozoic. Fully transitioning the study of morphological evolution into the omics era will involve the development of tools to automate the extraction of meaningful, comparable morphometric data from images, integrate fossil data into large phylogenetic trees and downstream evolutionary analyses, and generate robust models that accurately reflect the complexity of evolutionary processes and are well-suited for high-dimensional data. Combined, these advancements will solidify the emerging field of evolutionary phenomics and appropriately center it around the analysis of deep-time data.

This study shows the impact of black carbon (BC) aerosol atmospheric rivers (AAR) on the Antarctic Sea ice retreat. We detect that a higher number of BC AARs arrived in the Antarctic region due to increased anthropogenic wildfire activities in 2019 in the Amazon compared to 2018. Our analyses suggest that the BC AARs led to a reduction in the sea ice albedo, increased the amount of sunlight absorbed at the surface, and a significant reduction of sea ice over the Weddell, Ross Sea (Ross), and Indian Ocean (IO) regions in 2019. The Weddell region experienced the largest amount of sea ice retreat ($ \sim \mathrm{33,000} $ km2) during the presence of BC AARs as compared to $ \sim \mathrm{13,000} $ km2 during non-BC days. We used a suite of data science techniques, including random forest, elastic net regression, matrix profile, canonical correlations, and causal discovery analyses, to discover the effects and validate them. Random forest, elastic net regression, and causal discovery analyses show that the shortwave upward radiative flux or the reflected sunlight, temperature, and longwave upward energy from the earth are the most important features that affect sea ice extent. Canonical correlation analysis confirms that aerosol optical depth is negatively correlated with albedo, positively correlated with shortwave energy absorbed at the surface, and negatively correlated with Sea Ice Extent. The relationship is stronger in 2019 than in 2018. This study also employs the matrix profile and convolution operation of the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to detect anomalous events in sea ice loss. These methods show that a higher amount of anomalous melting events were detected over the Weddell and Ross regions.

The integration of geotechnical and geophysical well logs, along with biostratigraphic and sediment analyses of borehole Schoten (northern Belgium), provides a better characterization of the glauconite-rich sandy Miocene successions near their type sections. It also provides a way to correlate the latter with more distal areas along the southern North Sea Basin. In the Schoten area, the Rupelian Boom Formation is unconformably overlain by the Lower to Middle Miocene Berchem Formation, which is in turn unconformably overlain by the Upper Miocene Diest Formation (Borsbeek Member). The Berchem Formation is formally subdivided into the Edegem, Kiel and Antwerpen members, which can be identified on the gamma-ray log of borehole Schoten. Sediment analyses show that the glauconite content and the local presence of phosphatic nodules are the main factors contributing to the fluctuating gamma-ray values. For the first time, the geophysical log signatures of the members of the Berchem Formation were correlated across large areas and major fault systems, which shows the regional significance of the boundaries between these members. Indeed, the boundary between the Edegem Member and the Kiel Member corresponds with the boundary between the Dutch Veldhoven and Groote Heide formations, known as the Early Miocene Unconformity. The overall higher gamma-ray values for the middle Miocene Antwerpen Member and equivalents in the upper part of the Dutch Groote Heide Formation are likely related to the eustatic sea level highs during the Miocene Climatic Optimum.

Science shows mounting global health risks associated with plastics life cycle pollution. Leveraging evidence and streamlining research to inform policy is critical to safeguarding people and planet. We conducted an electronic survey questionnaire, between 16th April and 16th August 2024, amongst United Nations government delegates developing the Global Plastics Treaty. We explored (1) perceptions and prioritisation of human health evidence, (2) preferred plastic pollution mitigation strategies, and (3) priorities for health research. Responses were collected in Qualtrics and analysed using summary statistics, the Fisher’s Exact Test, and thematically mapped to the Policy Cycle Framework. We received 27 survey responses, balanced by gender and career stage, including 23 countries and all World Bank country income classifications and regions, but greater representation from high-income and European countries. Human health was the highest-ranking concern related to plastics risks (Sum of rank scores (SRS) = 54). Most delegates expressed strong conviction in evidence of risks associated with plastics chemicals, polymers, products, microplastics and broader life cycle emissions. Reducing plastics production (SRS = 53) and eliminating chemicals, polymers and products of concern (SRS = 53) were prioritised, even amongst those affiliated with waste management departments or less convinced of health risks. We found the least regard for recycling as a strategy to protect health (SRS = 4–5) and eliminating open burning was the most prioritised downstream measure (SRS = 15). Generating quantitative, causal data on risks across plastics life cycles, identifying emerging health hazards, defining criteria, safe lists and substitutes for chemicals, polymers and products were government delegate priorities for research, alongside tools to track policy impacts on health and greater bilateral communication between scientists and delegations. Health risks of all forms of plastic pollution were a concern for most delegates responding to our survey. We identified key priorities for policy-driven research to strengthen the science-policy interface and support evidence-based plastics policy that protects human health.

The possibility of human extinction has received growing academic attention over the last several decades. Research has analysed possible pathways to human extinction, as well as ethical considerations relating to human survival. Potential causes of human extinction can be loosely grouped into exogenous threats such as an asteroid impact and anthropogenic threats such as war or a catastrophic physics accident. In all cases, an outcome as extreme as human extinction would require events or developments that either have been of very low probability historically or are entirely unprecedented. This introduces deep uncertainty and methodological challenges to the study of the topic. This review provides an overview of potential human extinction causes considered plausible in the current academic literature, experts’ judgements of likelihood where available and a synthesis of ethical and social debates relating to the study of human extinction.