Evolutionary paleoecology: recent contributions to evolutionary theory

Abstract

In the past decade, evolutionary paleoecology has shifted away from corroborative research of the “me-too-ecology” type toward its proper domain—the evolutionary consequences of ecological properties, roles, and strategies at the individual, population, community, and species levels. The science of evolutionary paleoecology tests for linkage between a species' ecology and its macroevolutionary history. Do the ecological characters of species within clades influence differential rate dynamics, particularly rates of faunal turnover and diversification? Intellectual coequality, once hampered by the misunderstanding that the role of paleoecology is to find examples of past ecology imperfectly entombed in the fossil record, is strengthened by the increasing number of evolutionary ecologists who have called for explicit paleontological contributions to resolve theoretical issues. The fossil record provides a necessary perspective to an understanding of process.