The Joint Meeting of the Polish Paleobiologists, and the 95th Annual Meeting of the Paläontologische Gesellschaft (PalGes) took place at the Faculty of Biology of the University of Warsaw from the 16th to the 21st of September 2024. The meeting was co-organized by the University of Warsaw (Faculty of Biology, Faculty of Geology), Institute of Paleobiology Polish Academy of Sciences, Paleontological Section of the Polish Geological Society, Polish Geological Institute – National Research Institute and the Paläontologische Gesellschaft. The Paläontologische Gesellschaft is one of the oldest and largest paleontological societies in the world and this is the first time that a joint event is hosted here in Poland! The key objective was to celebrate the diversity within paleontology across borders, while also highlighting its relevance in areas such as evolution, ecology, and conservation. PalGes meetings provide a valuable forum for scientists to share their research, engage in thoughtful exchanges, and cultivate collaborations. Its mission was not only to promote research excellence but also to enhance the visibility of our discipline in the public eye. With over 160 participants based in 17 countries, the conference was a great success. You can find more complete acknowledgements and abstracts in the abstract book.

Kenneth De Baets, PalGes Organising Committee. 

Niklas Hohmann PhD student at the Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University, Netherlands.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your research interests?

I am a geoscientist and paleontologist. The rock record preserves information about past changes, be it about the biosphere or climate change millions of years ago. As such, it can provide important information about long term dynamics that are not accessible to human observation or experiments. However, rocks are an imperfect recording medium: They can be destroyed, and the information recorded in them can be scrambled. My research focus is on rocks as a recording medium, with a focus on applications for ecology and evolution. Specifically, I use mathematical tools and simulations to examine how our understanding of biological change over long time scales is shaped by geological effects and biases.

What first interested you in this field of research?

I find this topic interesting because it is by definition interdisciplinary, and I enjoy working at the interfaces between disciplines. What might me trivial to a geoscientist can be novel to a biologist and vice versa, and each discipline comes with its own scientific dialect. As a result, a lot of my work is learning these dialects, and communicating between disciplines. In addition, interdisciplinary work allows me to cherry-pick the topics I am most curious about.

Can you briefly explain the research you presented at PalGes 2024?

At PalGes, I presented a study on how gaps in the rock record change our understanding of evolution. The incompleteness of the rock (and, as a result, the fossil) record has been a source of skepticism against the usage of fossil data for a long time, dating back to Darwin. We decided to test this by combining simulations of a carbonate platforms (depositional systems that include, among others, reefs) with evolutionary simulations. Our main finding was that incompleteness of the record is not the main concern for recovering evolutionary history, but rather the maximum length and the regularity of the gaps. Fundamentally, this is like missing parts of a movie. Missing 50 % of a movie sounds like a lot, and it is impossible to understand the plot if you are missing the last half of the movie. However, if you miss every second frame, it is still possible to follow the plot, although at a slightly lower frame rate.

Preservation of trait evolution (A) at different locations in a carbonate platform with comparable (in)completeness (B, C). In (B), there are only a few, but long gaps, which produce artefactual jumps in trait evolution. In (C) on the other hand, gaps are short and frequent, resulting in an unbiased representation of evolutionary history. This shows rather than incompleteness, maximum gap duration determines how biased the fossil record is. Hohmann et al. (2024). DOI: 10.1186/s12862-024-02287-2

How will you continue to build on this research?

Now that we know the effects of gaps, we work on methods to incorporate this geological information into empirical inferences. This is a twofold challenge: First, we need ways to provide this information to existing methods, which involves a lot of software development. Second, we need ways to estimate gap durations for empirical cases based on geological expert knowledge and simulation studies.