Using critical path method to analyse the radiation of rudist bivalves

It has been suggested that certain families of rudist bivalves (superfamily Hippuritoidea) were ‘preadapted’ to inhabit different environments and radiated to fill them. This scenario was based on a hypothesis of a geometric constraint of shell growth, a differential increase in the number of rudist genera possessing uncoiled shells relative to those possessing spirogyrate (i.e. coiled) shells, and a speculative phylogeny. In this paper, these …