Data from: Punctuated equilibria remains the dominant pattern of morphospecies origin in the fossil record: An analysis using the “persistence of ancestor” criterion

Punctuated Equilibria (PE) was presented 50 years ago as an alternative to
the widespread assumption that most evolution proceeds by gradual phyletic
change within lineages. Unfortunately, PE has been widely misunderstood,
misrepresented, and unfairly dismissed since this first publication. We
argue that much of this misunderstanding centers around a
misinterpretation of the meaning of “mode,” and the significance of mode,
properly understood, for how we understand macroevolutionary processes. PE
proposed that most morphospecies do not show significant anagenetic trends
through their stratigraphic ranges, and that most new morphospecies that
are recognized arise via cladogenesis. To the degree that this is true,
most exploration of disparity-space must be associated with cladogenesis.
We surveyed a sample of the recent paleontological literature to assess
the frequency with which new morphospecies appear in the fossil record via
anagenesis vs cladogenesis using a persistence of ancestor criterion and
found the overwhelmingly dominant mode of species origin to be
cladogenesis. This is a valuable but underutilized approach to this
problem, which could be exploited with more studies of species-level
phylogenies of fossil taxa. Combined with the conclusions of other studies
that stasis or non-directional change is common, this finding of the
dominance of cladogenesis affirms that PE is very much alive, and of
substantial significance for understanding macroevolutionary
patterns.