Reviewing the vertebrate fossil record
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Paleontology, Zoology
- Keywords
- vertebrate palaeontology, literature, vertebrates, palaeontology
- Copyright
- © 2017 Naish
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Reviewing the vertebrate fossil record. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3145v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3145v1
Abstract
The vastness of the vertebrate fossil record and its literature makes any effort to review it in entirety a difficult task; ‘a review’ is understood to be a work that discusses the evolution and diversity of a group, drawing in knowledge on taxonomy, morphology, ecology and distribution, with representative illustrations. Existing reviews of the entire vertebrate record have mostly been designed with teaching in mind and have focused on groups, trends and processes deemed of interest to students. As goes more specific reviews, some groups (Mesozoic dinosaurs in particular) are frequently reviewed; others are afflicted by their association with idiosyncratic authors, others have only been given partial treatment, and others are woefully under-represented. Biographical information on vertebrate palaeontologists themselves is scattered. An additional issue is that several excellent volumes (notably the Handbook volumes) are prohibitively expensive, rare or otherwise hard to obtain. Cenozoic fishes – in particular actinopterygians, the largest and richest vertebrate radiation – remain essentially untouched and it might not be obvious to non-specialists just how rich the fish record is. Indeed, an enormous number of lineages scarcely known to experts on modern fishes are present in the fossil record. The result of this skewed coverage is that both popular and technical perceptio n of the vertebrate fossil record is biased. Not only are there a huge number of groups that fail to attract students, a large number of research questions relevant to these groups remain un- or under-investigated because so few researchers are aware of their existence.
Author Comment
This is an abstract which has been accepted for the SVPCA/SPPC 2017 conference.