Abstract
It is no secret that fossilization can be a fickle process, being strongly influenced by a number of abiotic (e.g., habitat, oxygen level, isolation from other organisms, deposition, land disturbance, type of fossilization) and biotic (e.g., skeletal type, size of organism, life stage, population size) factors (e.g., Zherikhin, 2002). It also is a tremendously slow process, providing an extensive window of time for those forces to exert their influence. The result is a highly variable state of preservation from fossil to fossil. Some are extraordinarily true-to-life depictions of what the organism actually looked like millions of years ago (Li et al., 2013; Swanson et al., in press). Others, disarticulated and/or subject to geological pressures and upheavals, can fossilize less completely, with the resulting “depiction” difficult to interpret. More than occasionally, low preservational quality negatively affects taxonomic resolution, resulting in the misidentification or erroneous placement of fossil taxa (e.g., Popov, 2007; Fikáček & Schmied, 2013).
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