Palaeontology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Warm-water coral reefs are limited to tropical and subtropical latitudes today but extended poleward in the geological past. This study shows that climatic and tectonic drivers explain the past distribution of coral reefs and associated biodiversity.

    • Lewis A. Jones
    • , Philip D. Mannion
    •  & Daniel J. Lunt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global diversity trends in the fossil record vary regionally through time and space, affecting our ability to interpret macroevolutionary history. Here, the authors propose a method to eliminate spatial sampling bias, estimate origination and extinction rates, and generate diversity estimates, applying this method to the Late Permian to Early Jurassic marine fossil record.

    • Joseph T. Flannery-Sutherland
    • , Daniele Silvestro
    •  & Michael J. Benton

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Evidence for the presence of Homo during the Middle Pleistocene is limited in continental Southeast Asia. Here, the authors report a hominin molar from Tam Ngu Hao 2 (Cobra Cave), dated to 164–131 kyr. They use morphological and paleoproteomic analysis to show that it likely belonged to a female Denisovan.

    • Fabrice Demeter
    • , Clément Zanolli
    •  & Laura Shackelford

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Available methods to identify species from fragmented archaeological bone and remains suffer a trade-off between cost and resolution. Here, the authors present a workflow that uses automated sample preparation, 10 to 20 times faster data acquisition, and computerized data interpretation to make the technology applicable to large-scale studies.

    • Patrick Leopold Rüther
    • , Immanuel Mirnes Husic
    •  & Jesper Velgaard Olsen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The effect of biotic interactions among reef corals on macroevolutionary patterns is unclear. Here, the authors study the rich coral fossil record, finding that reef coral diversity experienced potentially biotic interaction-driven evolutionary rate changes, and that Staghorn corals affected fossil diversity trajectories of other coral groups.

    • Alexandre C. Siqueira
    • , Wolfgang Kiessling
    •  & David R. Bellwood

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is unclear how Lungfishes evolved durophagy, the consumption of hard prey, despite being the longest lineage of vertebrates with this feeding mechanism. Here, the authors describe exceptionally preserved fossils of Youngolepis from the Early Devonian, showing early adaptations to durophagy.

    • Xindong Cui
    • , Matt Friedman
    •  & Min Zhu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Chengjiang Biota is the earliest most diverse animal community from the Cambrian Explosion (~518 million years ago). This biota is shown to have colonized a delta, highlighting the importance of this shallow environment in recording early snapshots of life on Earth.

    • Farid Saleh
    • , Changshi Qi
    •  & Xiaoya Ma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors report nickel-porphyrins derivatives of chlorophyll in ~1 Gyr-old multicellular eukaryotes, preserved in low-grade metamorphic rocks. This brand new approach permits to identify early phototrophic organisms through the geological record.

    • Marie Catherine Sforna
    • , Corentin C. Loron
    •  & Emmanuelle J. Javaux

  • Article
    | Open Access

    ‘The timing and ecological dynamics of extinction in the late Pleistocene are not well understood. Here, the authors use sediment ancient DNA from permafrost cores to reconstruct the paleoecology of the central Yukon, finding a substantial turnover in ecosystem composition between 13,500-10,000 years BP and persistence of some species past their supposed extinctions.’

    • Tyler J. Murchie
    • , Alistair J. Monteath
    •  & Hendrik N. Poinar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Middle Ordovician icehouse has been suggested to be sparked by extra-terrestrial dust associated with an asteroid break-up. Here, the authors use an astronomically calibrated timescale to decouple millennia-scale climate and biodiversity change from the meteorite shower 468.4 million years ago.

    • Jan Audun Rasmussen
    • , Nicolas Thibault
    •  & Christian Mac Ørum Rasmussen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tooth morphology has provided many insights into the tempo and mode of dietary evolution in mammals. A study of fossil and extant squamates shows that this group also repeatedly evolved increasingly complex teeth with more flexibility than mammals, and that higher tooth complexity and herbivory likely led to higher speciation rates.

    • Fabien Lafuma
    • , Ian J. Corfe
    •  & Nicolas Di-Poï

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Harmful algal and bacterial blooms are increasingly frequent in lakes and rivers. From the Sydney Basin, Australia, this study uses fossil, sedimentary and geochemical data to reveal bloom events following forest ecosystem collapse during the end-Permian event and that blooms have consistently followed warming-related extinction events, inhibiting the recovery of freshwater ecosystems for millennia.

    • Chris Mays
    • , Stephen McLoughlin
    •  & Vivi Vajda

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Snakes are one of the most successful groups of living vertebrates, but the timing of their diversification is unclear. Combining molecular clocks, fossils, and biogeography, Klein et al. show that snakes experienced a diversification, and underwent dispersal, around the time of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.

    • Catherine G. Klein
    • , Davide Pisani
    •  & Nicholas R. Longrich

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The linkage between temperature change and extinction rates in the fossil record is well-known qualitatively but little explored quantitatively. Here the authors investigate the relationship of marine animal extinctions with rate and magnitude of temperature change across the last 450 million years, and identify thresholds in climate change linked to mass extinctions.

    • Haijun Song
    • , David B. Kemp
    •  & Xu Dai

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The common ancestor of all living arthropods had biramous postantennal appendages, with an endopodite and exopodite branching off the limb base. This study uses microtomographic imaging of the Cambrian arthropod Leanchoilia to reveal a previously undetected exite at the base of most appendages, suggesting a deeper origin for exites in arthropod phylogeny.

    • Yu Liu
    • , Gregory D. Edgecombe
    •  & Xianguang Hou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Increasing body and brain size constitutes a key pattern in human evolution, but the mechanisms driving these changes remain debated. Using a large fossil dataset combined with global paleoclimatic reconstructions, the authors show that different environmental variables influenced the evolution of brain and body size in Homo.

    • Manuel Will
    • , Mario Krapp
    •  & Andrea Manica

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In addition to major innovations in their locomotor system, early birds evolved highly derived skulls. Here, Wang et al. three dimensionally reconstruct the skull of a new enantiornithine bird from the Early Cretaceous that illustrates the early avialan transitions in skull morphology and function.

    • Min Wang
    • , Thomas A. Stidham
    •  & Zhonghe Zhou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Age-richness rate (ARR) estimates of evolutionary diversification are widely used to study factors that influence species richness among clades. Here the authors show that ARR inference is based on problematic assumptions and recommend against its use in comparison of past diversity or diversification rates across clades.

    • Daniel L. Rabosky
    •  & Roger B. J. Benson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Terrestrial ecosystems underwent major restructuring through the early Mesozoic, culminating in dinosaur-dominated faunas. Here Singh et al. use jaw morphology to classify tetrapod herbivores into distinct feeding groups and show that their success was shaped by environmental changes and competitive constraints.

    • Suresh A. Singh
    • , Armin Elsler
    •  & Michael J. Benton

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There are a number of competing explanations for the late Pleistocene extinction of many North American megafauna species. Here, the authors apply a Bayesian regression approach that finds greater concordance between megafaunal declines and climate change than with human population growth.

    • Mathew Stewart
    • , W. Christopher Carleton
    •  & Huw S. Groucutt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Cambrian is known as a period of rapid animal diversification, but the development of these animals is not well characterized. Here, Steiner et al. describe a new assemblage of Cambrian eggs, embryos and early postembryonic stages from Mongolia that provides insight into ancient bilaterian development and evolution.

    • Michael Steiner
    • , Ben Yang
    •  & Philip Donoghue

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The deglaciation of Marinoan snowball Earth (~635 Myr ago) has been associated with potentially extensive CH4 emissions in relation to transient marine euxinia. Here, the authors find that active methanogenesis occurred during the termination of Marinoan snowball Earth, fueled by methyl sulfide production in sulfidic seawater.

    • Zhouqiao Zhao
    • , Bing Shen
    •  & Haoran Ma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fungi may have evolved up to 2.4 billion years ago, but it is unclear when they first colonized land. Here Gan and colleagues report filamentous Ediacaran microfossils from South China that may represent early terrestrial fungi.

    • Tian Gan
    • , Taiyi Luo
    •  & Shuhai Xiao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Oldupai Gorge, Tanzania is a key site for understanding early human evolution. Here, the authors report a multiproxy dataset from the Western basin of Oldupai Gorge dating to 2 million years ago, enabling the in situ comparison of lithic assemblages, paleoenvironments and hominin behavioral adaptability.

    • Julio Mercader
    • , Pam Akuku
    •  & Michael Petraglia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fish production is predicted to decrease with anthropogenic global warming. Here the authors analyse fish fossil assemblages from 62–46 My old deep-sea sediments and instead find a positive correlation between fish production and ocean temperature over geological timescales, which a data-constrained model explains in terms of trophic transfer efficiency and primary production.

    • Gregory L. Britten
    •  & Elizabeth C. Sibert

  • Article
    | Open Access

    High-latitude records show large diversity losses of marine plankton, such as radiolarians, with historical climate change. Here, Trubovitz et al. present a low-latitude record spanning the last 10 million years, finding that many high-latitude radiolarians did not shift equatorward but instead went extinct.

    • Sarah Trubovitz
    • , David Lazarus
    •  & Paula J. Noble

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Modern mammals are endothermic, but it has not been clear when this type of metabolism evolved. Here, Newham et al. analyse tooth and bone structure in Early Jurassic stem-mammal fossils to estimate lifespan and blood flow rates, which inform about basal and maximum metabolic rates, respectively, and show these stem-mammals had metabolic rates closer to modern ectothermic reptiles than to endothermic mammals.

    • Elis Newham
    • , Pamela G. Gill
    •  & Ian J. Corfe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pleistocene population dynamics can inform the consequences of current climate change. This phylogeography of 35 complete American mastodon mitochondrial genomes suggests distinct lineages in this species repeatedly expanded northwards and then went locally extinct in response to glacial cycles.

    • Emil Karpinski
    • , Dirk Hackenberger
    •  & Hendrik N. Poinar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Non-traditional stable isotopes, such as of calcium, have potential to expand our understanding of ancient diets. Here, Martin et al. use stable calcium isotopes recovered from fossil tooth enamel to compare the dietary ecology of hominins and other primates in the Turkana Basin 2-4 million years ago.

    • Jeremy E. Martin
    • , Théo Tacail
    •  & Vincent Balter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The dynamics of how major clades and body plans arise and evolve in deep time remain poorly understood. Here, Simões et al. report major time lags between phases of rapid phenotypic change at the origin of major reptile lineages and periods of fast molecular change and adaptive radiation.

    • Tiago R. Simões
    • , Oksana Vernygora
    •  & Stephanie E. Pierce

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Parasitic interactions are difficult to document in the fossil record. Here, Zhang et al. analyze a large population of a Cambrian brachiopod and show it was frequently encrusted by tubes aligned to its feeding currents and that encrustation was associated with reduced biomass, suggesting a fitness cost.

    • Zhifei Zhang
    • , Luke C. Strotz
    •  & Glenn A. Brock

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Key events in human evolution are thought to have occurred between 3 and 2.5 Ma, but the fossil record of this period is sparse. Here, Alemseged et al. report a new fossil site from this period, Mille-Logya, Ethiopia, and characterize the geology, basin evolution and fauna, including specimens of Homo.

    • Zeresenay Alemseged
    • , Jonathan G. Wynn
    •  & Joseph Mohan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The causes of the Upper Pleistocene megafauna extinction in Australia and New Guinea are debated, but fossil data are lacking for much of this region. Here, Hocknull and colleagues report a new, diverse megafauna assemblage from north-eastern Australia that persisted until ~40,000 years ago.

    • Scott A. Hocknull
    • , Richard Lewis
    •  & Rochelle A. Lawrence

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Complex macroscopic organisms are first found in the Ediacaran period, but their ecology during this time is not well understood. Here, Bobrovskiy et al. analyse biomarkers from Ediacaran sediments hosting macrofossils and find evidence for abundant algal food sources available for these organisms.

    • Ilya Bobrovskiy
    • , Janet M. Hope
    •  & Jochen J. Brocks

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cloudinomorphs were one of the few groups to survive from the Ediacaran into the Cambrian, but they are known only from their external tubes. Here, Schiffbauer et al. report soft-tissue preservation of cloudinomorphs; the internal structures are interpreted as guts characteristic of bilaterians.

    • James D. Schiffbauer
    • , Tara Selly
    •  & Emily F. Smith

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The relative role of the Deccan Traps volcanic activity versus the role of the Chicxulub impact event in terms of potential contributions to the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction has been subject to longstanding debate. Here, the authors observe a global signal of abruptly increased ocean temperatures and elevated [Hg] in the same biogenic carbonate specimens, prior to the impact event but aligning with the onset of Deccan volcanism.

    • Kyle W. Meyer
    • , Sierra V. Petersen
    •  & Ian Z. Winkelstern

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