WASHINGTON: After conducting an extensive study on size, a Stanford research team found that, over time, marine animal lineages generally evolve to be larger.
The team, which included research scientists, undergraduates, and high school interns, amassed mountains of data under Stanford paleobiologist Jonathan Payne. The hulking dataset they compiled spans 542 million years, and includes five of the major phyla and over 17,000 genera – about 75 percent of all marine genera in the fossil record, and nearly 60 percent of all animal genera to have ever lived. They described their findings Thursday in Science.
“Size evolution had never been studied at that taxonomic or temporal scale before,” Dr. Payne says, “so it was unknown whether size tended to increase or not across the entire marine fauna. Several previous researchers had speculated or assumed that the average size had increased, but no previous research group had the data to conduct a rigorous test of the claim.”
Cope’s rule, named after 19th century American paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, is the notion that animal lineages tend to increase in physical size over evolutionary time. Although Cope himself never suggested it, the theory bearing his name has been contested since its proposal. Payne says his research seems to support Cope’s rule.
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