Concept of "evolutionary prospection"

 

Morphological evolution occurs at different times and different locations in the world ocean, often caused by the establishment of isolated watermasses after changing paleoceanographic conditions. If the new conditions last long enough throughout geological times environmental selection and pressure may lead to splitting and divergence of the daughter and ancestral populations. Lineages, that may arise this way can be recognized in the underlying fossil record by the careful mapping of morphological trends and/or by different geochemical signatures. Sometimes it may occur, that morphological responses to environmental pressure result in quite similar morphological trends, which cannot be distinguished from each other where they not separated by different locations or by different times. The search for such dynamics by means of morphological mapping of the shells of closely related species we refer to as "evolutionary prospection".

 

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