DETECTING NEW SPECIES AND SPECIATION IN THE FOSSIL RECORD

The process of speciation varies in its mechanism and duration among taxa. Ancestors may or may not co-exist substantially temporally and/or spatially with descendants. Using insights from extant speciation studies and what is known about the limitations of the fossil record, I explore how the detectability of incipient and new species might be affected by their changing geographic distribution and population size, given that we can distinguish them morphologically from their ancestral species. I try to answer some of the following questions: what are the chances of observing speciation in the fossil record ? What types of organisms can potentially give us our money’s worth if we are interested in “observing” speciation in the fossil record? How can we improve data collection and analyses for speciation studies using the fossil record? What can the fossil record tell us about speciation that other types of data and approaches cannot? Does origination tell us anything about speciation?