1.3 Billion years of acritarch history: An empirical morphospace approach

Acritarchs are a group of organic-walled vesicular microfossils interpreted as protists, and are among the first eukaryotes preserved in the fossil record. Taxonomic inconsistencies amongst acritarch workers have made it difficult to address the evolutionary history of this group through more traditional methods (i.e., biodiversity through species counts). We have constructed an empirical morphospace to examine the first 1.3 billion years of acritarch evolution. We show that protist morphologic evolution is broadly correlated with major environmental and biologic revolutions in Earth history such as late Neoproterozoic global glaciations, the first appearance of the Ediacaran metazoans and the Cambrian explosion. Our results also show that protist morphologic expansion precedes their taxonomic diversification; this pattern, similar to that seen in Phanerozoic animal clades, suggests that early morphospace saturation and convergence are common occurrences in eukaryote macroevolution. In addition, our data do not support a monotonic increase in maximum diameter of acritarch vesicles through the Proterozoic; instead, maximum vesicle diameter appears to fluctuate in the Proterozoic before decreasing significantly in the early Cambrian.