Zombie taxon on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
In
Estimating paleodiversities: a test of the taxic and phylogenetic methods
.
In paleontology
Paleontology (), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of fossi ...
, a zombie taxon (plural ''zombie taxa'') or the zombie effect refers to a fossil that was washed out of sediments and re-deposited in rocks and/or sediments millions of years younger. That basic mistake in the interpretation of the age of the fossil leads to its title, in that the discovered fossil was at some point mobile (or "walking") despite the original organism having been long dead. When that occurs, the fossil is described as a "reworked fossil
A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved i ...
" or ''remanié''.
See also
*Convergent evolution
Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar features in species of different periods or epochs in time. Convergent evolution creates analogous structures that have similar form or function but were not present in the last com ...
* Dead clade walking
In ecology, extinction debt is the future extinction of species due to events in the past. The phrases dead clade walking and survival without recovery express the same idea.
Extinction debt occurs because of time delays between impacts on a speci ...
* Extinction
Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the Endling, last individual of the species, although the Functional ext ...
* Elvis taxon In paleontology, an Elvis taxon (plural ''Elvis taxa'') is a taxon that has been misidentified as having re-emerged in the fossil record after a period of presumed extinction, but is not actually a descendant of the original taxon, instead having de ...
* Lazarus taxon
In paleontology, a Lazarus taxon (plural ''taxa'') is a taxon that disappears for one or more periods from the fossil record, only to appear again later. Likewise in conservation biology and ecology, it can refer to species or populations tha ...
* Living fossil
A living fossil is an extant taxon that cosmetically resembles related species known only from the fossil record. To be considered a living fossil, the fossil species must be old relative to the time of origin of the extant clade. Living foss ...
Further reading
*Archibald, J. David. (1996). Dinosaur Extinction and the End of An Era. Columbia University Press, 672-684. , who defined the terms zombie effect and zombie taxon/taxa. * Weishampel, David B. et al. (2004). ''The Dinosauria''. University of California Press. . *Abigail Lane et al.Estimating paleodiversities: a test of the taxic and phylogenetic methods
.
References
{{reflist Extinction Phylogenetics