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Controlling for the species-area effect supports constrained long-term Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrate diversification

Close, RA; Benson, RBJ; Upchurch, P; Butler, RJ; (2017) Controlling for the species-area effect supports constrained long-term Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrate diversification. Nature Communications , 8 , Article 15381. 10.1038/ncomms15381. Green open access

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Abstract

Variation in the geographic spread of fossil localities strongly biases inferences about the evolution of biodiversity, due to the ubiquitous scaling of species richness with area. This obscures answers to key questions, such as how tetrapods attained their tremendous extant diversity. Here, we address this problem by applying sampling standardization methods to spatial regions of equal size, within a global Mesozoic-early Palaeogene data set of non-flying terrestrial tetrapods. We recover no significant increase in species richness between the Late Triassic and the Cretaceous/Palaeogene (K/Pg) boundary, strongly supporting bounded diversification in Mesozoic tetrapods. An abrupt tripling of richness in the earliest Palaeogene suggests that this diversity equilibrium was reset following the K/Pg extinction. Spatial heterogeneity in sampling is among the most important biases of fossil data, but has often been overlooked. Our results indicate that controlling for variance in geographic spread in the fossil record significantly impacts inferred patterns of diversity through time.

Type: Article
Title: Controlling for the species-area effect supports constrained long-term Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrate diversification
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15381
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15381
Language: English
Additional information: © This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Earth Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1558057
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