Signor-Lipps effect

English

Etymology

Named after American paleontologists Philip Signor and Jere Lipps, who formally proposed it in 1982.

Noun

Signor-Lipps effect

1. (paleontology) The principle that due to the incompleteness of the fossil record, the earliest and latest known occurrences of a taxon will almost never represent the ages of the actual earliest and latest organisms belonging to it.