The Rise of Skeletal Biominerals

The ability of organisms to synthesize skeletons and functional biomin- Too stucure to one of the mot remartable agents in the timeline of mineral evolution. The relatively abrupt rise of such forms in the fossil record marks the beginning of a new type of chemistry whereby biology develops a playbook of mineralization processes whose strategies scientists are only beginning to decipher. The first outlines of an impressive picture are emerging, in which the blochemical machinery and sequence of instructions that pass forward to subsequent generations are being defined. Yet, skeletons are anything but static in the transfer. The fossil record shows the dynamic responses of skeletal structures to shifts in environmental conditions over acolook time.