title: Biodiversity is not (and never has been) a bed of roses!
abstract: Over the last decades, the critical study of fossil diversity has led to significant advances in the knowledge of global macroevolutionary patterns of biodiversity. The deep-time history of life on Earth results from background originations and extinctions defining a steady-state, nonstationary equilibrium occasionally perturbed by biotic crises and "explosive" diversifications. More recently, a macroecological approach to the large-scale distribution of extant biodiversity offered new, stimulating perspectives on old theoretical questions and current practical problems in conservation biology. However, time and space are practically distinct, but functionally related dimensions of ecological systems. This calls for a spatially-integrated study of biodiversity dynamics at an evolutionary timescale. Indeed, the biosphere is a complex adaptive system whose study cannot be arbitrarily reduced to any single spatial- and/or temporal-scale level of resolution without a loss of content. From such an integrated perspective, a simple fact emerges: in a physically heterogeneous and ever-changing world, spatiotemporal variations in biodiversity are the rule-not the exception.
authors.affiliation: UMR-CNRS 5276, laboratoire de géologie de Lyon, Terre, planètes, environnement, université Claude-Bernard Lyon 1, 27-43, boulevard du 11-Novembre 1918, 69622 Villeurbanne cedex, France. gilles.escarguel@univ-lyon1.fr
authors.forename: Gilles
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Escarguel
authors.forename: Emmanuel
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Fara
authors.forename: Arnaud
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Brayard
authors.forename: Serge
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Legendre
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D044822:Biodiversity; D005075:Biological Evolution; D002980:Climate; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D017753:Ecosystem; D053476:Extinction, Biological; D005580:Fossils; D006801:Humans; D010163:Paleontology