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Signor-Lipps effect

Signor-Lipps effect noun: 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.

Noun

Signor-Lipps effect

  1. 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.

Origin of Signor-Lipps effect

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

Questions about Signor-Lipps effect

What does Signor-Lipps effect mean?
Signor-Lipps effect means 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.
What part of speech is Signor-Lipps effect?
Signor-Lipps effect is a noun.

Words near Signor-Lipps effect in the dictionary

  1. signman
  2. signmen
  3. signoff
  4. signoffs
  5. signor
  6. Signor-Lipps effect
  7. signora
  8. signoras
  9. signore
  10. Signorelli
  11. Signorellis

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Signor-Lipps effect (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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