10.5061/DRYAD.1C5K9
Eliason, Chad M.
Field Museum of Natural History
Hudson, Leah
The University of Texas at Austin
Watts, Taylor
The University of Texas at Austin
Garza, Hector
The University of Texas at Austin
Clarke, Julia A.
The University of Texas at Austin
Data from: Exceptional preservation and the fossil record of tetrapod
integument
Dryad
dataset
2017
Hair
Feathers
Lagerstatten
Soft tissue preservation
National Science Foundation
https://ror.org/021nxhr62
EAR-1251922
2017-07-26T13:18:34Z
2017-07-26T13:18:34Z
en
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.0556
4516 bytes
1
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
The fossil record of exceptionally preserved soft tissues in
Konservat-Lagerstätten provides rare yet significant insight into past
behaviours and ecologies. Such deposits are known to occur in bursts
rather than evenly through time, but reasons for this pattern and
implications for the origins of novel structures remain unclear. Previous
assessments of these records focused on marine environments preserving
chemically heterogeneous tissues from across animals. Here, we investigate
the preservation of skin and keratinous integumentary structures in
land-dwelling vertebrates (tetrapods) through time, and in distinct
terrestrial and marine depositional environments. We also evaluate
previously proposed biotic and abiotic controls on the distribution of 143
tetrapod Konservat-Lagerstätten from the Permian to the Pleistocene in a
multivariate framework. Gap analyses taking into account sampling
intensity and distribution indicate that feathers probably evolved close
to their first appearance in the fossil record. By contrast, hair and
archosaur filaments are weakly sampled (five times less common than
feathers), and their origins may significantly pre-date earliest known
occurrences in the fossil record. This work suggests that among-integument
variation in preservation can bias the reconstructed first origins of
integumentary novelties and has implications for predicting where, and in
what depositional environments, to expect further discoveries of
exquisitely preserved tetrapod integument.
R functions for integrating fossil uncertaintyR functions for integrating
fossil uncertainty over time bins of various
widthslagerstatten_dryad_R_functions.RLagerstatten dataset used in
analysesBinned (10-My) Lagerstatten dataset used in all statistical
analysesfinal_dataset.csv