Disentangling rock record bias and common-cause from redundancy in the British fossil record.

ABSTRACT: The fossil record documents the history of life, but the reliability of that record has often been questioned. Spatiotemporal variability in sedimentary rock volume, sampling and research effort especially frustrates global-scale diversity reconstructions. Various proposals have been made to rectify palaeodiversity estimates using proxy measures for the availability and sampling of the rock record, but the validity of these approaches remains controversial. Targeting the rich fossil record of Great Britain as a highly detailed regional exemplar, our statistical analysis shows that marine outcrop area contains a signal useful for predicting changes in diversity, collections and formations, whereas terrestrial outcrop area contains a signal useful for predicting formations. In contrast, coll

SUBMITTER: Dunhill AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4164781 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature