What can fossil records teach scientists about ancient ecosystems and marine environments? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated a link between fossils and ancient ecosystems. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the evolution of ecosystems and what this could mean for present life on Earth.
For the study, the researchers conducted statistical analyses on living and fossilized organisms with the goal of better understanding ecosystem evolution. The samples included 135 living marine organisms, 150 fossilized organisms, and 112 from a predicted fossil record across 51 sites throughout North Carolina. After meticulous calculations, the researchers found that ancient ecosystems and marine environments could be analyzed using fossilized organisms.
“There are no pristine ecosystems left on the planet, so when you are trying to restore an ecosystem that can be a difficult and challenging task without having any idea of what it looked like before,” said Dr. Carrie Tyler, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Geoscience at UNLV and lead author of the study. “It hasn’t been free of human impacts or pristine for thousands of years, so we don’t have records of what that ecosystem is ‘supposed’ to look like. This study shows the fossil record can be used to give us an idea of what that ecosystem used to look like, and what functions are needed to keep it healthy.”
One of the primary reasons why past ecosystems aren’t remaining worldwide is due to the Earth’s geological processes that essentially erase these ecosystems from the face of the Earth. These processes include plate tectonics, erosion, and even extreme weather events over thousands of years.
What new discoveries about fossils and ancient ecosystems will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, EurekAlert!