ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the ecological changes that have occurred in the marine biosphere through Earth history and how the patterns may be analysed through palaeoecological studies. The fossil record of the origins of the Eukaryota is unfortunately obscure because the differences in cell structure between prokaryotes and eukaryotes is not preserved during fossilization. Of the three evolutionary faunas, the Ediacara fauna is widely recorded, even though it is non-skeletonized. The contrary view is that major extinctions fundamentally change the course of evolution in a way that could not have been predicted from previous diversity patterns (see later discussion). It affects the record of appearances and extinction of taxa and assessments of taxonomic diversity. It is suggested that factor analysis of diversity data could not discriminate between associations created by stochastically generated phylogenies and the associations characterizing the evolutionary faunas.
