26
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Ancient Origin of the Modern Deep-Sea Fauna

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          The origin and possible antiquity of the spectacularly diverse modern deep-sea fauna has been debated since the beginning of deep-sea research in the mid-nineteenth century. Recent hypotheses, based on biogeographic patterns and molecular clock estimates, support a latest Mesozoic or early Cenozoic date for the origin of key groups of the present deep-sea fauna (echinoids, octopods). This relatively young age is consistent with hypotheses that argue for extensive extinction during Jurassic and Cretaceous Oceanic Anoxic Events (OAEs) and the mid-Cenozoic cooling of deep-water masses, implying repeated re-colonization by immigration of taxa from shallow-water habitats. Here we report on a well-preserved echinoderm assemblage from deep-sea (1000–1500 m paleodepth) sediments of the NE-Atlantic of Early Cretaceous age (114 Ma). The assemblage is strikingly similar to that of extant bathyal echinoderm communities in composition, including families and genera found exclusively in modern deep-sea habitats. A number of taxa found in the assemblage have no fossil record at shelf depths postdating the assemblage, which precludes the possibility of deep-sea recolonization from shallow habitats following episodic extinction at least for those groups. Our discovery provides the first key fossil evidence that a significant part of the modern deep-sea fauna is considerably older than previously assumed. As a consequence, most major paleoceanographic events had far less impact on the diversity of deep-sea faunas than has been implied. It also suggests that deep-sea biota are more resilient to extinction events than shallow-water forms, and that the unusual deep-sea environment, indeed, provides evolutionary stability which is very rarely punctuated on macroevolutionary time scales.

          Related collections

          Most cited references41

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          Abrupt deep-sea warming, palaeoceanographic changes and benthic extinctions at the end of the Palaeocene

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Geochemistry of oceanic anoxic events

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Permo-Triassic Boundary Superanoxia and Stratified Superocean: Records from Lost Deep Sea

              Isozaki (1997)
              Pelagic cherts of Japan and British Columbia, Canada, recorded a long-term and worldwide deep-sea anoxic (oxygen-depleted) event across the Permo-Triassic (or Paleozoic and Mesozoic) boundary (251 ± 2 million years ago). The symmetry in lithostratigraphy and redox condition of the boundary sections suggest that the superocean Panthalassa became totally stratified for nearly 20 million years across the boundary. The timing of onset, climax, and termination of the oceanic stratification correspond to global biotic events including the end-Guadalupian decline, the end-Permian extinction, and mid-Triassic recovery.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2012
                10 October 2012
                : 7
                : 10
                : e46913
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Geoscience Centre, University of Göttingen, Department of Geobiology, Göttingen, Germany
                [2 ]School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom
                [3 ]Natural History Museum Vienna, Department of Geology and Palaeontology, Vienna, Austria
                [4 ]Marum – Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
                [5 ]Geoscience Centre, Museum, Collections and Geopark, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
                [6 ]Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, Sweden
                Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Conceived and designed the experiments: BT ASG MK. Performed the experiments: BT AK LDNT MR SS. Analyzed the data: BT ASG AK MK LDNT MR SS. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: MK. Wrote the paper: BT ASG MK.

                Article
                PONE-D-12-14937
                10.1371/journal.pone.0046913
                3468611
                23071660
                3015b536-4a11-452b-837b-c827dac0ae48
                Copyright @ 2012

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 24 May 2012
                : 6 September 2012
                Page count
                Pages: 11
                Funding
                The study was funded by the German Research Foundation ( http://www.dfg.de/index.jsp), grant RE2599/6-1, and by the European Union funded Synthesys program ( http://www.synthesys.info/), grants SE-TAF-2674 and SE-TAF-2969. Deposition of the described material in the collections of the Natural History Museum in London (UK), the micropaleontological collection at the University of Tübingen (D) and the Geoscientific Museum at the University of Göttingen (D) was done with the permission of the respective institutes. We acknowledge support by the German Research Foundation and the Open Access Publication Funds of the Göttingen University. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Biology
                Ecology
                Paleoecology
                Evolutionary Biology
                Forms of Evolution
                Macroevolution
                Organismal Evolution
                Animal Evolution
                Paleontology
                Invertebrate Paleontology
                Paleontology
                Invertebrate Paleontology
                Earth Sciences
                Geology
                Historical Geology
                Paleontology
                Invertebrate Paleontology
                Micropaleontology
                Paleobiology

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

                Comments

                Comment on this article