Chronospecies

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As chronospecies ( Greek  χρόνος chronos , "time Latin species , type ') refers to a taxon in paleontology , which similar to the biological nature , but is not identical due to other definition.

In general, one assigns different fossils to different chronospecies if they are of different ages and sufficiently different in their characteristics. The term is therefore more subjective than the biological species term for eukaryotes .

The subdivision of a development line (e.g. of ammonites ) into different chronospecies is problematic, because if the location is good, there are many fossils available, which usually only differ from one another gradually if they are found in adjacent layers. However, if one looks at fossils from this evolutionary line that show a greater geological time difference, they differ so greatly that one has clear differences in characteristics and can clearly assign them to different species.

This problem is closely related to speciation in the course of evolution . In general, many mutations are only expressed as minor morphological deviations. So it takes many generations, until the genome has changed so that the sum of the changes (e.g. examinable., By sequencing of DNA and RNA ) the differences between two related allopatrisch formed of biological species corresponds.

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