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

博士后奖学金：EAR-PF：评估全球化石记录质量的新方法：埋藏学和系统发育学之间的前沿

• 批准号: 2305564
• 负责人: Charles Woolley
• 金额: $ 18万
• 依托单位: Woolley, Charles Henrik
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Fellowship Award
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-08-01 至 2025-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2305564&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Postdoctoral; Fellowship; EAR; PF; Novel

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.

化石激发了我们的想象力，尤其是世界各地博物馆展厅中保存完好的标本，这些稀少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佳线索。博物馆收藏中的场景蕴含着巨大的宝贵科学信息宝库，这些信息保存在不太完整的化石中，这些化石通常从未出现在公众面前，尽管其中许多标本没什么可看的，但它们仍然有潜力为科学家提供帮助。丰富的生物、生态和进化信息可以帮助我们更好地了解地球上生命的历史然而，古生物学家仍在试图找出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）中。这项新颖的研究旨在检验传统上持有的假设，即不完整的化石（代表了大多数已知的灭绝生物多样性）所包含的进化信息不如其更完整的部分可靠。对陆地和海洋化石记录进行首次采样，以揭示动物生命之树不同分支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（例如蜥蜴、该调查将把世界各地自然历史博物馆收藏的基于标本的数据与一系列系统发育比较方法、指标和测试结合起来，以确定特殊情况的影响。这是一项令人兴奋且必要的工作，因为这项研究产生的结果增加了美国博物馆收藏的不完整标本的科学价值。随着我们继续拼凑过去，我们对过去的了解越完整，我们就越有能力准确预测和管理当今生态系统的变化。我们的星球继续变暖。该项目支持 PI Woolley 的博士后研究，涉及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。该项目的目标也是植根于 STEM 最容易接触到的公众界面上的机构：自然历史博物馆。该项目旨在应用 PI Woolley 博士期间开发的系统发育比较方法来表征在空间和时间上观察到的具有重要生态意义的动物群体化石记录的质量。珊瑚、海胆、有鳞动物和鸟类化石记录的完整性，然后评估这些有偏差的记录的系统发育信息内容，从而评估我们推断进化关系的能力。该项目的原则将古生物学中很少重叠的学科结合起来：1。 ）海洋和陆地沉积学领域；2）无脊椎动物和脊椎动物古生物学；3）埋藏学和系统发育学。全球性、跨学科、史无前例的研究直接解决了征集的主题：“与规模有关的问题”。该项目研究了化石记录是如何通过现有的地质、埋藏学和人为收集偏差进行过滤的。在博物馆收藏的局部范围内，在古生物学数据库等聚合收藏数据库的全球范围内，通过评估有偏见和零碎的化石记录保留有关进化关系的信息的能力，可以为整合大量化石奠定基础。将化石记录转化为对不同时间的生物多样性模式进行更综合的古生物学分析，对具有生态意义的动物群体的不同样本进行化石记录偏差的表征，也将使我们能够梳理不同进化枝、环境、区域或区域的记录偏差。与一般化石保存中普遍存在的化石记录相比，它具有时间依赖性，从而为未来的埋藏学研究和化石记录质量评估提供了关键的大规模背景。 除了支持早期职业研究员 PI Woolley 之外，该项目还将最终，更好地了解偏见如何影响多个层面的化石记录质量也将提供改进的上下文数据来预测和管理。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。