Marine invertebrate migrations trace climate change over 450 million years

Aim: Poleward migration is a clear response of marine organisms to current global warming but the generality and geographical uniformity of this response are unclear. Marine fossils are expected to record the range shift responses of taxa and ecosystems to past climate change. However, unequal sampling (natural and human) in time and space biases the fossil record, restricting previous studies of ancient migrations to individual taxa and events. We expect that temporal changes in the latitudinal distribution of surviving taxa will reveal range shifts to trace global climate change. Location: Global. Time period: Post-Cambrian Phanerozoic aeon. Major taxa studied: Well-fossilised marine benthic invertebrates comprising stony corals, bivalves, gastropods, brachiopods, trilobites and calcifying sponges. Methods: We track deviations in the latitudinal distribution of range centres of age-to-age surviving taxa from the expected distribution, and compare responses across latitudes. We build d...