2015
DOI: 10.1111/brv.12238
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Fossils of parasites: what can the fossil record tell us about the evolution of parasitism?

Abstract: Parasites are common in many ecosystems, yet because of their nature, they do not fossilise readily and are very rare in the geological record. This makes it challenging to study the evolutionary transition that led to the evolution of parasitism in different taxa. Most studies on the evolution of parasites are based on phylogenies of extant species that were constructed based on morphological and molecular data, but they give us an incomplete picture and offer little information on many important details of p… Show more

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Cited by 60 publications
(45 citation statements)
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References 293 publications
(366 reference statements)
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“…It may come as a surprise to many ecologists that parasites themselves are sometimes fossilized (Leung ). For example, the remains of putative hooks of flatworms, possibly of species within the Monogenea or Cestoda, have been reported in the fossilized bodies of Devonian juvenile fish (Upeniece ), and a 44‐million‐year‐old fossil louse collected in Germany is so well preserved that bird feather barbules are visible in its foregut (Figure ; Wappler et al .…”
Section: Archaeo‐ and Paleoparasitologymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…It may come as a surprise to many ecologists that parasites themselves are sometimes fossilized (Leung ). For example, the remains of putative hooks of flatworms, possibly of species within the Monogenea or Cestoda, have been reported in the fossilized bodies of Devonian juvenile fish (Upeniece ), and a 44‐million‐year‐old fossil louse collected in Germany is so well preserved that bird feather barbules are visible in its foregut (Figure ; Wappler et al .…”
Section: Archaeo‐ and Paleoparasitologymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Pearl formation, however, can have a variety of causes, many of which are not due to parasites (Lauckner 1983). For example, De Baets et al (2011) reported pearls in ammonoid shells that do not match with the patterns modern digeneans leave in bivalve shells (Lauckner 1983;Cremonte 2004;Leung 2017, see also Huntley and De Baets 2015).…”
Section: Parasitismmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Although difficult to detect, because parasites are often very small and soft bodied, it is even more complicated to identify the parasite after its soft body has decomposed (Conway Morris 1981;De Baets et al 2015b;Leung 2017). This largely depends on the fact that different parasites can lead to similar reactions of the host due to convergence in the evolution of host exploitation strategies (Littlewood and Donovan 2003;De Baets et al 2015b;Leung 2017).…”
Section: Parasitismmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…This is especially true for viruses, bacteria and unicellular eukaryotes but also applies to parasitic metazoans. For this reason the fossil record has often been overlooked in the study of parasite evolution, although evidence of parasitism in deep time is perhaps more extensive than many researchers have assumed (Conway Morris, 1981;De Baets and Littlewood, 2015;Leung, 2017).…”
Section: The Fossil Record Of Parasites As a Source Of Calibrationsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Two issues that make the application of the molecular clock challenging to apply in reality are that (1) rates of molecular evolution are often non-constant, and (2) calibrations are rarely known very precisely. In general, these issues also become increasingly problematic further back in time, and as we go into detail in the following sections may be particularly problematic in the case of many parasites, which are soft-bodied, microscopic and reside within their hosts (Littlewood and Donovan, 2003;De Baets and Littlewood, 2015;Leung, 2017).3…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%