10.5061/DRYAD.280GB5MMV
Close, Roger
0000-0003-3302-9902
University of Birmingham
Benson, Roger
University of Oxford
Alroy, John
Macquarie University
Carrano, Matthew
0000-0003-2129-1612
Smithsonian Institution
Cleary, Terri
0000-0003-0424-8073
University of Birmingham
Dunne, Emma
University of Birmingham
Mannion, Philip
University College London
Uhen, Mark
0000-0002-2689-0801
George Mason University
Butler, Richard
0000-0003-2136-7541
University of Birmingham
The apparent exponential radiation of Phanerozoic land vertebrates is an
artefact of spatial sampling biases
Dryad
dataset
2020
Sampling standardisation
tetrapods
European Research Council
https://ror.org/0472cxd90
637483
2020-03-24T00:00:00Z
2020-03-24T00:00:00Z
en
340846011 bytes
6
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
There is no consensus about how terrestrial biodiversity was assembled
through deep time, and in particular whether it has risen exponentially
over the Phanerozoic. Using a database of 38,711 fossil occurrences, we
show that the spatial extent of the ‘global’ terrestrial tetrapod fossil
record itself expands exponentially through the Phanerozoic, and that this
spatial variation explains around 75% of the variation in known fossil
species counts. Controlling for this bias, we find that regional-scale
terrestrial tetrapod diversity was constrained over timespans of tens to
hundreds of millions of years, and similar patterns are recovered for
major subgroups, such as dinosaurs, mammals and squamates. The
Cretaceous/Paleogene mass extinction, 66 million years ago, fundamentally
disrupted terrestrial ecosystems, catalysing an abrupt increase in its
aftermath. Nevertheless, this was followed by general stasis and recent
diversity levels do not exceed those of the Paleogene. These findings
parallel those recovered in analyses of local community-level richness,
suggesting that tetrapod beta diversity has also not shown a general
increase through time. Taken together, our findings strongly contradict
past studies that suggested unbounded diversity increases over the last
100 million years.
Data processing steps are detailed in the Methods section of the paper.
Occurrence data were downloaded from the Paleobiology Database
(www.paleobiodb.org). Paleobiology Database are licensed under a CC BY 4.0
International License
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>, but
permission was received to archive this subset of data in Dryad under CC0
terms. For any subsequent use of this data, please also attribute the
Paleobiology Database and the authors of the original records. The URLs
for the downloads are all included in the dataset as text files, which are
listed below. Aves_URL.txt Cetacea_URL.txt Chiroptera_URL.txt
Dinosauromorpha^Aves_URL.txt Ichthyosauromorpha_URL.txt
Lissamphibia_URL.txt Mosasauria_URL.txt Pinnipedimorpha_URL.txt
Probainognathia^Chiroptera_URL.txt Pseudosuchia_URL.txt
Pterosauromorpha_URL.txt Sauropterygia_URL.txt Sirenia_URL.txt
Squamata_URL.txt Testudinata_URL.txt Tetrapoda_coll_URL.txt
Tetrapoda^Aves^Chiroptera^Pterosauromorpha_URL.txt Thalattosuchia_URL.txt