EEB Tuesday Seminar Series- Within-lineage evolution across time scales: Reconciling the recent and the fossil record

Description: Connecting generational processes (microevolution) to the larger-scale patterns of phenotypic diversification (macroevolution) remains a fundamental challenge in evolutionary biology. Phenotypic time series, defined as sequences of measurements drawn from multiple organisms in the same lineage over time, offer a direct window into this problem. Time series from the fossil record typically span tens to hundreds of thousands of years or more, documenting historical patterns of evolutionary change in a single species over durations far beyond what we can observe in the present. This makes fossil trait series a uniquely valuable data source for addressing fundamental questions about how evolution operates across time scales. I will present analyses of large compilations of phenotypic time series from both living populations and the fossil record, with the goal of assessing whether evolutionary processes are continuous across generations to millions of years, or whether something changes as we move between scales.