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      Seafood through time: changes in biomass, energetics, and productivity in the marine ecosystem

      Paleobiology
      Cambridge University Press (CUP)

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          Abstract

          The biomass of marine consumers increased during the Phanerozoic. This is indicated by the increase in both fleshiness and average size of individuals of dominant organisms, coupled with the conservative estimate that dominant organisms in the Cenozoic are at least as abundant as those in the Paleozoic. As faunal dominants replaced one another during the Phanerozoic the general level of metabolic activity increased due to both increase in basal metabolism and increase in more energetic modes of life. This demonstrates that the expenditure of energy by marine consumers has increased with time as well. There is a time lag in the expansion of more energetic life habits from environmental settings known to have high food supply into regions expected to have lower rates of food supply (e.g., bivalves into offshore carbonate environments or deep burrowing deposit feeders into the full range of shelf environments), and a time lag in diversification of energetic modes of life (e.g., predation or deep burrowing deposit feeding) for long intervals after they first appeared. This suggests that the supply of food increased across the whole spectrum of marine habitats during the Phanerozoic. The great diversification of specialized predators especially suggests that biomass increase took place all the way down the food chain to the level of primary production. The development of plant life on land and the impact of land vegetation on stimulating productivity in coastal marine settings, coupled with the transfer of organic material and nutrients from coastal regions to the open ocean, and the increase through time in diversity and abundance of oceanic phytoplankton all point to increased productivity in the oceans through the Phanerozoic.

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          Most cited references68

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          The Mesozoic marine revolution: evidence from snails, predators and grazers

          Tertiary and Recent marine gastropods include in their ranks a complement of mechanically sturdy forms unknown in earlier epochs. Open coiling, planispiral coiling, and umbilici detract from shell sturdiness, and were commoner among Paleozoic and Early Mesozoic gastropods than among younger forms. Strong external sculpture, narrow elongate apertures, and apertural dentition promote resistance to crushing predation and are primarily associated with post-Jurassic mesogastropods, neogastropods, and neritaceans. The ability to remodel the interior of the shell, developed primarily in gastropods with a non-nacreous shell structure, has contributed greatly to the acquisition of these antipredatory features.
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            A factor analytic description of the Phanerozoic marine fossil record

            Data on numbers of marine families within 91 metazoan classes known from the Phanerozoic fossil record are analyzed. The distribution of the 2800 fossil families among the classes is very uneven, with most belonging to a small minority of classes. Similarly, the stratigraphic distribution of the classes is very uneven, with most first appearing early in the Paleozoic and with many of the smaller classes becoming extinct before the end of that era. However, despite this unevenness, aQ-mode factor analysis indicates that the structure of these data is rather simple. Only three factors are needed to account for more than 90% of the data. These factors are interpreted as reflecting the three great “evolutionary faunas” of the Phanerozoic marine record: a trilobite-dominated Cambrian fauna, a brachiopod-dominated later Paleozoic fauna, and a mollusc-dominated Mesozoic-Cenozoic, or “modern,” fauna. Lesser factors relate to slow taxonomic turnover within the major faunas through time and to unique aspects of particular taxa and times.
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              Atmospheric transport of iron and its deposition in the ocean

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                applab
                Paleobiology
                Paleobiology
                Cambridge University Press (CUP)
                0094-8373
                1938-5331
                1993
                April 2016
                : 19
                : 03
                : 372-397
                Article
                10.1017/S0094837300000336
                ef4a7f2a-d6d6-4f01-84df-351edb5077f1
                © 1993
                History

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