•  47
    The cambrian evolutionary 'explosion' recalibrated
    with Richard A. Fortey and Derek E. G. Briggs
    Bioessays 19 (5): 429-434. 1997.
    The sudden appearance in the fossil record of the major animal phyla apparently records a phase of unparalleled, rapid evolution at the base of the Cambrian period, 545 Myr ago. This has become known as the Cambrian evolutionary ‘explosion’, and has fuelled speculation about unique evolutionary processes operating at that time. The acceptance of the palaeontological evidence as a true reflection of the evolutionary narrative has been criticised in two ways: from a reappraisal of the phylogenetic…Read more
  •  19
    The shape of life: how much is written in stone? (review)
    with Richard A. Fortey
    Bioessays 22 (12): 1142-1152. 2000.
    Considering the enormous diversity of living organisms, representing mostly untapped resources for studying ecological, ontogenetic and phylogenetic patterns and processes, why should evolutionary biologists concern themselves with the remains of animals and plants that died out tens or even hundreds of millions of years ago? The reason is that important new insights into some of the most vexing evolutionary questions are being revealed at the interfaces of palaeontology, developmental biology a…Read more
  •  10
    In a recent paper,(1) palaeontologist Mike Benton claimed that our ability to reconstruct accurately the tree of Life may not have improved significantly over the last 100 years. This implies that the cladistic and molecular revolutions may have promulgated as much bad “black box” science as rigorous investigation. Benton's assessment was based on the extent to which cladograms (typically constructed with reference only to distributions of character states) convey the same narrative as the geoch…Read more