Abstract
Lately there has been a wave of criticism of the concept of living fossils. First, recent research has challenged the status of paradigmatic living fossil taxa, such as coelacanths, cycads, and tuataras. Critics have also complained that the living fossil concept is vague and/or ambiguous, and that it is responsible for misconceptions about evolution. This paper defends a particular phylogenetic conception of living fossils, or taxa that (a) exhibit deep prehistoric morphological stability; (b) contain few extant species; and (c) make a high contribution to phylogenetic diversity. The paper shows how this conception of living fossils can make sense of recent research on contested cases. The phylogenetic living fossil concept has both theoretical and practical importance: theoretical, because it picks out an important explanatory target for evolutionary theory; and practical, because it picks out taxa that we might wish to prioritize for conservation. The best way to defend the concept of living fossils is to get clearer about the reasons for defending living fossil taxa.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See also this educational video from the PBS Eons series, which declares that living fossils aren’t really “a thing”: https://www.pbs.org/video/living-fossils-arent-really-a-thing-tlkrnz/.
For present purposes, this simple intuitive example suffices. However, if we wanted to make this more precise, we should begin by constructing phylogenetic trees for the species on islands A and B. We’d then need a quantitative measure of evolutionary distinctiveness, so that we can assign each species an index. Most scientists start out by counting the nodes (branching points) between each species and the root of the tree (where the root is the nearest ancestor that all of them have in common.) From there, things get more complicated, and there is much debate about what other information, such as branch length, should be included in a measure of evolutionary distinctiveness (Vellend et al. 2011).
I thank Adrian Currie for raising this issue.
References
Bennett TJ, Sutton MD, Turvey ST (2017) Evolutionarily distinct ‘living fossils’ require both lower speciation and lower extinction rates. Paleobiology 43(1):34–48
Brinkman H, Venkatesh B, Brenner S, Meyer A (2004) Nuclear protein-coding genes support lungfish and not the coelacanth as the closest living relatives of land vertebrates. PNAS 101(14):4900–4905
Brouwers L (2012) Coelacanths are not living fossils. Like the rest of us, they evolve. Sci Am Thoughtomics Blog (6 Feb 2012). https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtomics/coelacanths-evolve-indian-ocean-is-home-to-distinct-populations/. Last accessed 28 Jan 2018
Carnall M (2016) Let’s make living fossils extinct. The Guardian (6 July 2016). https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/06/why-its-time-to-make-living-fossils-extinct. Retrieved 27 Jan 2018
Casane D, Laurenti P (2013) Why coelacanths are not ‘living fossils’. BioEssays 35:332–338
Cavin L, Guinot G (2014) Coelacanths as ‘almost living fossils’. Front Ecol Evol 2:1–5
Cavin L, Kemp A (2011) The impact of fossils on the evolutionary distinctiveness and conservation status of the Australian lungfish. Biol Cons 144:3140–3142
Creisler B (2015) Darwin’s ‘living fossils’ and the 1856 pterodactyl hoax. https://dml.cmnh.org/2015Feb/msg00109.html. Retrieved 24 Sept 2015
Currie A (2016) Triceratops against concepts. Extinct: The Philosophy of Palaeontology Blog (15 Aug 2016). https://www.extinctblog.org/extinct/2016/8/15/triceratops-against-concepts. Last accessed 28 Jan 2018
Darwin C (1859–1964) On the origin of species. A facsimile of the first edition. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Eldredge N, Gould SJ (1972) Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism. In: Schopf TJM (ed) Models in paleobiology. Freeman, Cooper, & Co., San Francisco, pp 85–115
Erdman MV, Caldwell RL, Moosa MK (1998) Indonesian ‘King of the Sea’ discovered. Nature 395:335
Faith DP (1992) Conservation evaluation and phylogenetic diversity. Biol Cons 61:1–10
Frazier I (2014) Blue bloods. The New Yorker (14 Apr 2014). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/14/blue-bloods. Last accessed 28 Jan 2018
Gilmore S, Hill KD (1997) Relationships of the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis) and a molecular phylogeny of the Araucariaceae. Telopea 7(3):275–291
Gordon EO (2010) The life and correspondence of William Buckland, D.D., F.R.S. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Hay JM, Subramanian S, Millar CD et al (2008) Rapid molecular evolution in a living fossil. Trends Genet 24(3):106–109
Herrera-Flores JA, Stubbs TL, Benton MJ (2017) Macroevolutionary patterns in rhyncocephalia: is the tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) a living fossil? Palaeontology 60(3):319–328
Isaac NJB, Turvey ST, Collen B, Waterman C, Baillie JEM (2007) Mammals on the EDGE: conservation priorities based on threat and phylogeny. PLoS ONE 2:e296
Jones ME (2008) Skull shape and feeding strategy in Sphenodon and other Rhyncocephalia (Diapsida: Lepidosauria). J Morphol 269L:945–966
Korsmeyer C (2016) Real old things. Br J Aesth 56(3):219–231
Lean C, McLaurin J (2016) The value of phylogenetic diversity. In: Pellens R, Grandcolas P (eds) Biodiversity conservation and phylogenetic systematics. Topics in biodiversity and conservation, vol 14, Springer, Berlin, pp 19–30
Levinton JS (1983) Stasis in progress: the empirical basis of macroevolution. Annu Rev Ecol Syst 14:103–137
Lidgard S, Love AC (2018) Rethinking living fossils. BioScience 68(10):760–770
MacLaurin J, Sterelny K (2008) What is biodiversity? University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Mathers TC, Hammond RL, Jenner RA, Hänfling B, Gómez A (2013) Multiple global radiations in tadpole shrimps challenge the concept of ‘living fossils’. PeerJ 1:e62
Nagalingum NS, Marshall CR, Quental TB et al (2011) Recent synchronous radiation of a living fossil. Science 334:796–799
Nuwer R (2013) There’s no such thing as a ‘living fossil. Smithsonian.com (3 Apr 2013). https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-living-fossil-14360996/. Retrieved 27 Jan 2018
Rudkin DM, Young GA, Nowlan GS (2008) The oldest horseshoe crab: a new xiphosurid from Late Ordovician Konservat-Lagerstätten deposits, Manitoba, Canada. Palaeontology 51:1–9
Rudwick MJS (1972) The meaning of fossils: episodes in the history of palaeontology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Sarkar S (2010) Biodiversity and environmental philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Schopf TJM (1984) Rates of evolution and the notion of ‘living fossils’. Ann Rev Earth Planet Sci 12:245–292
Turner D (2010) Paleontology: a philosophical introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Turner D (2017) Paleobiology’s uneasy relationship with the Darwinian tradition. In: Delisle R (ed) The Darwinian tradition in context: research programs in twentieth century evolutionary biology. Springer, Berlin, pp 333–352
Vellend M et al (2011) Measuring phylogenetic biodiversity. In: MacGurran AE, McGill BJ (eds) Biological diversity: frontiers in measurement and assessment. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 194–207
Wang X, Nan L, Wang Y, Zheng S (2009) The discovery of whole-plant fossil cycad from the upper Triassic in western Liaoning and its significance. Chin Sci Bull S4:3116–3119
Weinberg S (2001) A fish caught in time: the search for the coelacanth. Harper Perennial, New York
Winter M, Devictor V, Schweiger O (2013) Phylogenetic diversity and nature conservation: Where are we? Trends Ecol Evol 28(4):199–204
Yong E (2013) The falsity of living fossils. The Scientist (2 Apr 2013). https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34927/title/The-Falsity-of-Living-Fossils/. Retrieved 27 Jan 2018
Acknowledgements
Early work on this project was supported by a visiting fellowship at the KLI in Klosterneuburg, Austria, in the fall of 2015. I am also grateful to Fulbright Canada for support during the spring of 2017, which enabled me to spend a semester at the University of Calgary. I shared an early version of this paper with an audience in Calgary in January 2017, and am grateful to the philosophers there for invaluable feedback: Soohyun Ahn, Megan Delahanty, David Dick, Marc Ereshefsky, Alison McConwell, Mark Migotti, Celso Neto, Ken Waters, and others. I am also deeply grateful to the Calgary philosophy department for being such a wonderful and welcoming place to work on this Project. The paper has benefitted immensely from comments from two anonymous referees for this journal, and from Adrian Currie’s philosophical and editorial help and advice.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Turner, D.D. In defense of living fossils. Biol Philos 34, 23 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-019-9678-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-019-9678-y