Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2017

‘Residual diversity estimates’ do not correct for sampling bias in palaeodiversity data

From Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) This blog post is way overdue, being mostly written months ago in late Oct. Anyway, it's a bit technical - but it relates to how palaeontologists quantify biodiversity through time (like the famous Sepkoski curve shown above). I have a newish paper ( ‘Residual diversity estimates’ do not correct for sampling bias in palaeodiversity data ) in Methods in Ecology and Evolution,  with Chris Venditti and Mike Benton, that became available in  Early View version  in Oct last year (24 Oct 2016). The paper is very simple and straightforward. In it we assess a popular method that has been used numerous times to 'correct' for sampling bias in palaeobiodiversity data. It is safe to say that most palaeontologists would agree that the fossil record is far from complete and that any kind of tallying of the numbers of species that were present in any given time period would suffer from this incompleteness - biodiversity curves (such as the fa