The fossil record of bioerosion: a new paper decades in the making

I am very pleased to announce the appearance of “The fossil record of bioerosion“, an invited review paper now on the Journal of Paleontology FirstView server. My excellent team of coauthors includes Paul Taylor (Natural History Museum, UK), Ursula Toom (Department of Geology, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia) and Olev Vinn (Department of Geology, University of Tartu, Estonia). This paper was invited for a special volume of the Journal of Paleontology to mark its centennial anniversary in 2027. It is open access and thus available to anyone. The following description is modified from the abstract.

Bioerosion is the biological removal, abrasion, or dissolution of hard substrates. It has produced a rich and behaviorally informative trace fossil record spanning the Archean to the Recent. We wrote a comprehensive review of the fossil record of bioerosion based on an exhaustive survey of the ichnological literature through August 2026. Building on earlier syntheses, we compiled and critically evaluated all currently valid bioerosional ichnogenera and ichnospecies, documenting their original authorship, substratum preference, inferred trace makers, architectural design, ichnofamilial assignment, and stratigraphic ranges resolved to, where possible, the stage level. The resulting database recognizes 151 valid bioerosional ichnogenera and 419 ichnospecies. Analyses of ichnodiversity and ichnodisparity of the bioerosion record shows that the most fundamental architectural designs of bioerosion were established by the end of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE), with relatively limited innovation thereafter. Ichnogenus diversity increased overall through the Phanerozoic, punctuated by major diversification pulses in the Late Ordovician, Late Triassic, Jurassic, and especially the Cretaceous. In contrast to body fossil patterns, most mass extinctions, including the end-Permian event, are only weakly expressed in the bioerosional ichnogenus record; the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary shows the most pronounced decline. These patterns underscore the resilience and recurrence of bioerosional behaviors through deep time.

We believe our primary contribution to the ichnological literature is our extensive database, which we linked as an online resource with Dryad ( https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.d51c5b0kg ). Future researchers are invited to download these spreadsheets and then correct, augment and otherwise edit them as desired to reveal more patterns in the stratigraphy and paleoecology of bioerosion. The paper, its extensive bibliography and its database are all open access. We also encourage professionals and anyone else interested to visit the Bioerosional Trace Fossil Database ( https://tracefossils.info/ ) , a richly-illustrated and updated website envisioned and maintained by our coauthor Ursula Toom.

Finally, I’d like to repeat here my line in the paper’s acknowledgements: “MW thanks The College of Wooster for decades of supporting paleontological research.”

Reference:

Wilson, M.A., Taylor, P.D., Toom, U. and Vinn, O. 2026. The fossil record of bioerosion. Journal of Paleontology (FirstView).