Radiation and extinction: investigating clade dynamics in deep time

The field of macroevolutionary research has grown rapidly in recent decades, bringing new sources of data and rigorous new methodologies to the analysis of organismal evolution through deep time. In November 2014, a 2-day symposium and workshop on 'Radiations and Extinctions: Clade Dynamics in Deep Time' was held at the Linnean Society of London and Imperial College London, with the goal of bringing together a diverse array of researchers developing and applying methods for reconstructing deep-time macroevolutionary patterns in biodiversity, with a particular focus on analytical approaches that take advantage of the wealth of data available in the fossil record. In this special issue, contributors to this meeting present and critique methodologies for examining radiations, extinctions, and clade dynamics through deep time and apply these approaches to a range of taxonomic groups, time intervals, and themes, including speciation and extinction, ecometric patterning, evolutionary rates, and morphological disparity. Combined, this special issue covers topics that are fundamental to macroevolutionary research and provides a valuable resource on cutting-edge analytical approaches in this field.