Seth Finnegan

TL;DR: This work highlights episodes of climate change that have disrupted ecosystems and trophic interactions over time scales ranging from years to millennia by changing species’ relative abundances and geographic ranges, causing extinctions, and creating transient and novel communities dominated by generalist species and interactions.

TL;DR: An exhaustive review and reanalysis of geological, paleontological, and molecular records converge upon a cohesive narrative of gradually emerging land and constricting seaways, with formation of the Isthmus of Panama sensu stricto around 2.8 Ma.

TL;DR: This work used carbonate “clumped” isotope paleothermometry to constrain ocean temperatures, and thereby estimate ice volumes, through the Late Ordovician–Early Silurian glaciation, and finds tropical ocean temperatures of 32° to 37°C except for short-lived cooling by ~5°C during the final Ordovicians stage.

TL;DR: This work evaluated the selectivity of genus survivorship with respect to geographic range by using a global database of fossil benthic marine invertebrates spanning the Cambrian through the Neogene periods, showing that wide geographic range has been significantly and positively associated with survivorship for the great majority of Phanerozoic time.

TL;DR: This period-level compilation of the largest known fossil organisms demonstrates that maximum size increased by 16 orders of magnitude since life first appeared in the fossil record.