David Jablonski—Response for the 2017 Paleontological Society Medal
hardly perfect or complete, even under the best circumstances, and there’s been great profit in working to integrate neo- and paleo-approaches to a growing array of questions in ecology, evolution, conservation biology, developmental biology, bio- mechanics, biogeochemistry, and many more. But we should always remember, and proudly point out,
that we have dynamics and diversity data in all its currencies— taxonomic, phylogenetic, functional, and morphological, to name a few. We have real ecological baselines and real ancestral character states, real paleobiogeographies, and dips and recov- eries from perturbations of every conceivable scale, and some inconceivable ones too. The other great wing of what might be called historical biology, which works almost exclusively with present-day species and molecular phylogenies, is incredibly fertile as well. But think about how much is gained when we reach across the paleo-/neo-divide. To give just the most glaring example: molecular phylogenies necessarily put the maximum taxonomic diversity of any clade at the present day. But consider the living groups that we know are just shadows of their former selves—the horse lineage, the elephant lineage, the hominin lineage, and don’t even get me started on trigonioid bivalves, campaniloid snails, or cassiduloid echinoids. Plenty of other groups with little or no fossil record must have had similar dynamics, but it’s very hard to detect those patterns rigorously. The same goes for morphology—who’d guess from today’s snapshot of biodiversity that there were carnivorous kangaroos, giant ground sloths, 2mtall flightless predatory cranes, uncoiled nautiloids, coiled oysters, and so on, each showing the evolu- tionary and developmental accessibility of currently vacant parts of morphospace. And the same is true for spatial dis- tributions: there are the rhinos and elephants that used to be in the New World, not just Africa and Asia, the hummingbirds that used to be in the Old World, not just North and South America, and fossil trigoniids and campanilids, which were global, from Patagonia to northern Europe, and are now only in Australia. To show how pervasive these effects are, all of the fossils used to time-calibrate the frog phylogeny in a recent PNAS paper are from North America, and none of those lineages is in North
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America today. No algorithm reaching back from the extant branch-tips could have inferred that. The point is that we have unique data along each of these
key axes—time, space, and form—and without fossil data, analyses of the dynamics along any of those axes, short- or long- term, can be positively misleading. Which of course everyone in this room knows, although outside this room it tends to get more lip service than serious attention. But we need to do more than just point this out, though we should do that too. We need to participate fully in, and preferably drive, the integration of paleo research with the other strands of historical biology. Of course, many of the richest datasets of neontology don’t match ours: songbirds, fruitflies, orchids, figs and their figwasps, and the rest. But there are many solutions to this disconnect, ranging from focusing on, or developing, study systems that are rich from both the paleo and neo sides, to pushing harder on non- traditional ways to use sparse or episodic fossil records. Some of this work is underway. It looks very promising, but there’s a lot more to do. To wrap up, I’mnot in any way saying that we should work
only on the fossil record of extant species, clades, or commu- nities. I’m saying the opposite—that integrative and compara- tive work, on whatever group, in whatever environment, in whatever time interval, can be fascinating and consequential. It’s the questions that are important, and it’s conceptual inte- gration, a two-way street, not just methodological integration, that’s the key. With our endless set of natural experiments, we have a unique window into how the world works. And the amazing thing is we get paid to study and teach it. And for that I’m deeply grateful, and I’m deeply grateful to the Paleontolo- gical Society for this honor.
Department of the Geophysical Sciences University of Chicago
5734 South Ellis Avenue Chicago, IL 60637, USA <
djablons@uchicago.edu>
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