Macroevolutionary History of the Planktic Foraminifera

Abstract

Planktic foraminifera are an abundant component of deep-sea sediment and are critical to geohistorical research, primarily because as a biological and geochemical system they are sensitive to coupled bio-hydro-lithosphere interactions. They are also well sampled and studied throughout their evolutionary history. Here, we combine a synoptic global compilation of planktic foraminifera with a stochastic null model of taxonomic turnover to identify statistically significant increases in macroevolutionary rates. There are three taxonomic diversifications and two distinct extinctions in the history of the group. The well-known Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction is of unprecedented magnitude and abruptness and is linked to rapid environmental perturbations associated with bolide impact. The Eocene-Oligocene boundary extinction occurs due to a combination of factors related to a major reorganization of the global climate system. Changes in ocean stratification, seawater chemistry, and global climate recur as primary determinants of both macroevolutionary turnover in planktic foraminifera and spatiotemporal patterns of deep-sea sedimentation over the past 130 Myr.

Macrostrat: A Platform for Geological Data Integration and Deep‐Time Earth Crust Research

“…Columns are assigned to “projects” that identify these groups, some of which might share primary source reference(s), compilation approaches, or regions. For example, the deep sea data set consists entirely of core descriptions compiled from offshore drilling sites (Peters et al, ; Fraass et al ), whereas the continental record in North America consists of regionally composited geologic columns. Because the latter typically lack precise definitions of geographic extent, the boundaries between all such composited columns in Macrostrat are currently interpolated using Voronoi tesselation and a manually constructed bounding geometry.…”

Dispersal in the Ordovician: Speciation patterns and paleobiogeographic analyses of brachiopods and trilobites

“…Hemisphere ice sheets (Fraass et al, 2015;Davis et al, 2016). Cooling would have caused an increased temperature gradient between polar and equatorial regions, leading to increased wind strength over the oceans (Brown et al, 2001;Rasmussen et al, 2016).…”

Morphospace expansion paces taxonomic diversification after end Cretaceous mass extinction

“…Planktic foraminifer diversity data and species ranges are based on those reported in Fraass et al 18 , who compiled them from community-based atlas projects [48][49] . Such a global compilation avoids the problems of studying the recovery of diversity/complexity at any particular site, as it avoids the range of possible local effects on species diversity, and allows direct comparison to similar global diversity records 15,18,19,[29][30][31][32][33]40 . The species included and their first and last occurrence datums are very similar to other recent efforts (e.g., Aze et al 50 ).…”

“…Generally, spinose foraminifera can be identified by careful microstructure examination for the presence of diagnostic spine holes 5 . Symbiont-bearing planktic foraminifera are commonly identified by the stable isotopic signature of their test tend to have tests relatively enriched in 13 C, caused by the effect of algal photosymbionts on the microhabitat from which the foraminifer precipitates its calcite shell and relatively depleted in 18 O, indicating a shallow water habitat 52 . Species with neither of these indicators, commonly referred to as microperforate or smooth normal perforate, are observed in the modern ocean to be mainly herbivores, feeding on phytoplankton and detritus 5 .…”