Abstract
Inference of past and present global biodiversity requires enough global data to distinguish biological pattern from sampling artifact. Pertinently, many studies have exposed correlated relationships between richness and sampling in the fossil record, and methods to circumvent these biases have been proposed. Yet, these studies often ignore paleobiogeography, which is undeniably a critical component of ancient global diversity. Alarmingly, our global analysis of 481,613 marine fossils spread throughout the Phanerozoic reveals that where localities are and how intensively they have been sampled almost completely determines empirical spatial patterns of richness, suggesting no separation of biological pattern from sampling pattern. To overcome this, we analyze diversity using occurrence records drawn from two discrete paleolatitudinal bands which cover the bulk of the fossil data. After correcting the data for sampling bias, we find that these two bands have similar patterns of richness despite markedly different spatial coverage. Our findings suggest that i) long-term diversity trends result from large-scale tectonic evolution of the planet, ii) short-term diversity trends are region-specific, and iii) paleodiversity studies must constrain their analyses to well-sampled regions to uncover patterns not driven by sampling.
Highlights
Patterns of biogeography, latitudinal diversity gradients, macroecology, and macroevolution result from biological processes constrained by the configurations of continents and earth processes [1]
As first noted by Allison & Briggs [17], if the spatial distribution of fossil taxa changes between time bins, how can we reject the hypothesis that observed changes in recorded diversity are due to shifts in spatial sampling patterns? A quantitative assessment of the spatial pattern of paleontological sampling and sampled taxonomic richness is an essential first step for any large-scale paleobiodiversity analysis
We demonstrate that the paleolatitudinal distribution of paleontological sampling and taxonomic richness does shift significantly over geological time, revealing time intervals of the rock record where geographical bias needs to be accounted for
Summary
Latitudinal diversity gradients, macroecology, and macroevolution result from biological processes constrained by the configurations of continents and earth processes [1]. Paleobiologists interested in the detection of these patterns and the processes that gave rise to them must first overcome unevenness and inconsistency of spatiotemporal sampling in the fossil record [2,3] This problem is manifested in various, often correlated ways: entire biogeographical regions without aragonitic shells [4,5], uneven sampling of the latitudinal diversity gradient [6], inter and intra-regional variation in rock amount and quality [7,8,9], spatiotemporal differences in sampling effort and taxonomic identification [10,11,12,13], and cross-regional differences of preserved sedimentary environments and habitats [14,15]. We apply modeling to see if we can establish how marine invertebrate diversity has changed over the Phanerozoic within fixed paleolatitudinal strips, controlling for sampling biases
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