Fossilization can mislead analyses of phenotypic disparity.

Abstract excerpt

Analyses of morphological disparity can incorporate living and fossil taxa to facilitate the exploration of how phenotypic variation changes through time. However, taphonomic processes introduce non-random patterns of data loss in fossil data and their impact on perceptions of disparity is unclear. To address this, we characterize how measures of disparity change when simulated and empirical data are degraded...

Topics

• Phylogeny
• Biological Evolution
• Fossils
• Phenotype