Preservation and bias in the Cambrian fossil record
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Paleontology views deep time ecosystems through a taphonomic lens, biased and restricted by the controls enacted on each fossil deposit by various environmental factors, and including chemical and biological variables. Human-induced bias has recently been acknowledged as an additional layer of complexity, contributing further inconsistencies of our understanding of metazoan diversity in deep time. The Cambrian Haiyan Lagerstatte of Yunnan, China, examined in Chapter 2, preserves an exceptionally diverse biota, with many of its soft-bodied and biomineralized organisms being preserved via pervasive pyritization with associated carbon films. The exceptional pyritization of many soft-bodied organisms--which otherwise may not have been preserved--shows that this ecosystem is an exceptional repository of Cambrian biodiversity, but there remains uncertainty in the regional application of this mode of preservation. On the other hand, the biotas of the Marjum, Wheeler, Weeks formations and Spence Shale Lagerstatte of the western U.S. show significant discrepancies in the diversity of each deposit when the published taxonomic record of these Lagerstatten is compared to the taxonomic record of those formations deposited in publicly available collections. As detailed in Chapter 1, this shows that, while the diversity of deep time ecosystems may be conserved and well-represented in some cases, the published representation of those ecosystems is inherently flawed.
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M.S.