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, collection and formation counts are information redundant with fossil richness, characterized by symmetric, bidirectional information flow. If this is true, the widespread use of collection and formation counts as sampling proxies to correct the raw palaeodiversity data may be unwarranted.
Highlights
The fossil record documents the history of life, but the reliability of that record has often been questioned
The evidence resides in the fossil record, and yet this record is compromised by incompleteness and bias, and it has been debated whether bias dominates the data[1,4,5,6,7,8,9], or not[10,11,12,13]
In the search for methods to provide a bias-free, or corrected, palaeodiversity signal, proposals have been made to use rock outcrop areas and collection and formation counts as sampling proxies to correct the raw palaeodiversity data[8,14,15,16,17,18], but the usefulness of such approaches has been queried[19,20]
Summary
The fossil record documents the history of life, but the reliability of that record has often been questioned. Collection and formation counts are information redundant with fossil richness, characterized by symmetric, bidirectional information flow If this is true, the widespread use of collection and formation counts as sampling proxies to correct the raw palaeodiversity data may be unwarranted. Palaeodiversity (fossil taxonomic richness) curves and their covariation with sampling proxies can be explained by any of three hypotheses, alone or in combination: (1) the rock record bias (RRB) hypothesis[4,5,6,7,27] that variability in the amount of available rock determines fossil diversity; (2) the common-cause (CC) hypothesis[11,13,28,29,30] that much of the covariation of fossil and rock records is because both are driven by a third factor such as sea level change; or (3) the redundancy (RED) hypothesis[20,31] that rock and fossil record proxies covary because of operational redundancy (that is, more collecting may result in greater richness, but high richness may result in more collecting) and statistical redundancy (that is, various time series are different versions of the same signal), reflecting the mutual reinforcement of the sampling proxy and fossil richness. What is needed is some statistical means of indicating the directionality of potential drive–response relationships, in lieu of mechanistic process models
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