O’ yeah just set up my publications on Google Scholar Citations. This is awesome!
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A key event in the Earth’s history, the first appearance of life, is not recognized as a major time boundary. This has lead to numerous scientific inaccuracies and inefficiencies. In the paper we propose that in recognition of the importance of life in the Earth’s history and the efficiency to divide the geological time scale into two informal supereons: Pregeozoic (the abiotic supereon) and Geozoic (the biotic supereon). O’ yes I just helped name a new supereon.
Head over to read more.
Seth Finnegan, Craig M McClain, Matthew A Kosnik and Jonathan L Payne (2011) Escargots through time: an energetic comparison of marine gastropod assemblages before and after the Mesozoic Marine Revolution. Paleobiology: Spring 2011, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 252-269.
The modern structure of marine benthic ecosystems was largely established during the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous (200-100 Ma), a transition that has been termed the Mesozoic Marine Revolution (MMR). Although it has been suggested that the MMR marks an increase in the average energy consumption of marine animal ecosystems, this hypothesis has not been evaluated quantitatively. In this study, we integrate body size and abundance data from the fossil record with physiological data from living representatives to estimate mean per capita metabolic rates of tropical to subtropical assemblages of shallow-marine gastropods—a major component of marine ecosystems throughout the Meso-Cenozoic—both before and after the MMR. We find that mean per capita metabolic rate rose by
Abstract: Consensus is growing among ecologists that energy and the factors influencing its utilization can play overarching roles in regulating large-scale patterns of biodiversity. The deep sea—the world’s largest ecosystem—has simplified energetic inputs and thus provides an excellent opportunity to study how these processes structure spatial diversity patterns. Two factors influencing energy availability and use are chemical (productive) and thermal energy, here represented as seafloor particulate organic carbon (POC) flux and temperature. We related regional patterns of benthic molluscan diversity in the North Atlantic to these factors, to conduct an explicit test of species–energy relationships in the modern day fauna of the deep ocean. Spatial regression analyses in a model-averaging framework indicated that POC flux had a substantially higher relative importance than temperature for both gastropods and protobranch bivalves, although high correlations between variables prevented definitive interpretation. This contrasts with recent research on temporal variation in fossil diversity from deep-sea cores, where temperature is generally a more significant predictor. These differences may reflect the scales of time and space at which productivity and temperature operate, or differences in body size; but both lines of evidence implicate processes influencing energy utilization as major determinants of deep-sea species diversity.
Some quotes from me are also included
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150% between the Late Triassic and Late Cretaceous and remained relatively stable thereafter. The most important factor governing the increase in metabolic rate was an increase in mean body size. In principle, this size increase could result from secular changes in sampling and taphonomic biases, but these biases are suggested to yield decreases rather than increases in mean size. Considering that post-MMR gastropod diversity is dominated by predators, the net primary production required to supply the energetic needs of the average individual increased by substantially more than 150%. These data support the hypothesis that benthic energy budgets increased during the MMR, possibly in response to rising primary productivity.
