Searching across hundreds of databases
The fossil record is a rich source of information about biological diversity in the past. However, the fossil record is not only incomplete but has also inherent biases due to geological, physical, chemical and biological factors. Our knowledge of past life is also biased because of differences in academic and amateur interests and sampling efforts. As a result, not all individuals or species that lived in the past are equally likely to be discovered at any point in time or space. To reconstruct temporal dynamics of diversity using the fossil record, biased sampling must be explicitly taken into account. Here, we introduce an approach that uses the variation in the number of times each species is observed in the fossil record to estimate both sampling bias and true richness. We term our technique TRiPS (True Richness estimated using a Poisson Sampling model) and explore its robustness to violation of its assumptions via simulations. We then venture to estimate sampling bias and absolute species richness of dinosaurs in the geological stages of the Mesozoic. Using TRiPS, we estimate that 1936 (1543-2468) species of dinosaurs roamed the Earth during the Mesozoic. We also present improved estimates of species richness trajectories of the three major dinosaur clades: the sauropodomorphs, ornithischians and theropods, casting doubt on the Jurassic-Cretaceous extinction event and demonstrating that all dinosaur groups are subject to considerable sampling bias throughout the Mesozoic.
Pubmed ID: 26977060 RIS Download
Publication data is provided by the National Library of Medicine ® and PubMed ®. Data is retrieved from PubMed ® on a weekly schedule. For terms and conditions see the National Library of Medicine Terms and Conditions.
International, curated, digital repository that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Particularly data for which no specialized repository exists. Provides the infrastructure for, and promotes the re-use of, data underlying the scholarly literature. Governed by a nonprofit membership organization. Membership is open to any stakeholder organization, including but not limited to journals, scientific societies, publishers, research institutions, libraries, and funding organizations. Most data are associated with peer-reviewed articles, although data associated with non-peer reviewed publications from reputable academic sources, such as dissertations, are also accepted. Used to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies.UC system is member organization of Dryad general subject data repository.
View all literature mentionsThe SciCrunch Infrastructure was developed as a cooperative data platform to be used by diverse communities in making data more FAIR.
scicrunch.org
